As many of our regular readers have already noticed, I am a huge proponent of the need for Lutheran educators to have well-developed personal learning networks (PLNs).  My PLN is the bread and butter of my professional development plan because it allows me to tap in to the knowledge and expertise of so many educators, administrators, and technologists around the world.  PLNs are also highly interactive, meaning that I can go to my PLN, ask a question, and have a reasonable expectation of receiving a response within a few hours or, usually, much less.

As the years have gone by, my PLN has been constantly evolving.  At first, it consisted mostly of a handful of blogs, but now, it includes blogs, podcasts, Facebook friends, and Twitter followers.  Keeping track of all of this can be something of a chore, which is why I rely on a collection of software programs to help automate the management of my PLN.  Blog updates are tracked with Google Reader, while I organize my podcasts with Apple’s iTunes.  Facebook and Twitter, though, presented me with quite the challenge until I made some changes to the way I interact with them.

The first change was using the official Facebook and Twitter clients on my Blackberry smartphone to receive immediate notifications of any messages coming to me via these services.  This allows me to immediately reply to those communications no matter where I might be, but it’s less than ideal for keeping caught up on the continuous flood of normal updates and tweets that come in from my friends and followers (i.e., the main reason for including Facebook and Twitter in my PLN).

For several months, I was accessing my Twitter accounts (more on that in a bit) from the web interface.  This was workable, but I lost a good deal of the power of Twitter because I was only getting updates when I was looking at the Twitter webpage and I always had to keep a tab open in my browser for Twitter.  Then, I discovered the subject of this week’s article, TweetDeck.

TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR-based application that allows a user to receive and make Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Google Buzz updates from one integrated client.  Using TweetDeck, I can instantly receive new tweets, status updates, mentions, and direct messages, and easily reply or retweet as needed.  The major feature that TweetDeck has over any other Twitter client is the ability to manage multiple accounts.  I currently have two Twitter accounts, one for my personal use and one for the Guild.  TweetDeck lets me see and use both accounts simultaneously.  TweetDeck also offers other useful features such as automatic URL shortening with numerous providers, short URL previewing to avoid accidentally opening malicious links, scheduled tweets, and many, many more.

I haven’t explored the Facebook integration, yet, but I have been very pleased with the Twitter options.  My only complaint, really, about TweetDeck is how much screen real estate it occupies.

As you can see, the TweetDeck interface is very clean, but there isn’t a way to control how much space each of the columns uses.  There also isn’t a way to display the columns in a grid-like fashion, which would allow you to display more information at the expense of vertical scrolling within each “cell”.

The desktop version of TweetDeck is free and available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.  Any computer that can run Adobe’s AIR 2 framework can run TweetDeck.  Unfortunately for Mac users, this means that TweetDeck cannot run on a PowerPC Mac.  The low PC and Linux requirements means that the vast majority of classroom PCs should be able to use the program.  It might also be a good use for an older, “retired” computer.  My solution to the above mentioned screen real estate problem was to setup a dedicated TweetDeck computer using an old PC laptop I salvaged.  I also use that same laptop to access my Google Reader account, so it’s really helped me to streamline how I access my PLN.

TweetDeck is also available for free for iPhone/iPod Touch, iPad, and Android users.