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One of the most popular Twitter clients, Tweetdeck, has added new features in the latest release,  version 0.31. It’s pushing forward as one of only two Twitter clients with a share of over 10%, as measured by Twitstats.

Included in the latest release is a new notification system which can be applied to certain groups. Plus it also has inline reply, retweets and direct messages inside the notification menu.

A major feature you might not notice is that Tweetdeck has now been optimised to consume less memory, which is good for everyone – plus there’s also the time-saving option of keyboard shortcuts, and a Heads-Up Display.

And depending on how popular you are, you might find the feature to view your newest 100 followers comes in useful as you can directly follow, block or add to a group.

Check oout the video below for the official walk-through:

I’ve played around with numerous Twitter analytics and statistic applications, and I have to say that Twitter Analyzer seems to be about the most comprehensive in terms of available information.

It features:-

User stats:- including number of tweets, reach, hashtags, popularity,etc etc.

Friends stats:- including f0llowers growth rate, location, activity and re-tweeting, etc.

Mentions:- including all, social, updates, etc.

Groups:- including by occupation, join date, gender, etc.

And Trends and Fun tabs are apparently ‘coming soon’.

It’s fast after the initial username analysis, and nicely presented, with handy graphs and charts. The biggest flaws currently are that you don’t seem to be able to export the charts and graphs to anywhere else (although there’s a handy ‘Tweet’ option for some of the interesting information you might want to share via Twitter.

It also seems to be limited to the 30 days for a lot of the information, in line with the data and limits that Twitter has. Which is understandable, but also frustrating. If they were able to pull data in on a regular schedule to provide longer timeframes once a username has first been indexed, and enable the ability to export the information for presentations and spreadsheets, it would be a clear leader in Twitter stats and analysis.

An interesting post on the Twittown apps and widget community blog suggested Twitter ‘Took on Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Won‘.

It tracks the timeline between Facebook updating the Terms of Service for the social network, and rolling back to the original terms due to the outcry over ownership of content uploaded.

And while I don’t believe that Twitter outcry alone led to the decision to move back to the original terms and consult users about updates – Google blog search shows the outcry through full length blogging – the Twittown post does suggest that Twitter opinions had a significant effect.

And I would expect the Facebook team to be monitoring Twitter alongside all other channels – especially as FB considered Twitter important enough to try to buy it!

And it shows how monitoring and responding to probably the largest, and certainly the quickest online focus group makes sense for adding value and monetisation, whether it’s by Twitter, or third-party applications like Tweetdeck.

As an Englishman (albeit one with a degree in American Studies), I’ve followed the U.S presidential nominations with a fairly casual interest, and with a slight leaning towards one candidate, but not enough that I’m going to talk about it.

Instead, I’m going to proclaim this the ‘Twitter Election’, and the sign of how news and reporting is changing for the better. First up is Twitter’s own Election 2008. It’s fascinating to watch the opinions and messages appearing every second, although the fact that it seems to be based around the keywords of candidates names means I’m tempted to tweet about McCain oven chips and see if it appears!

What’s interesting is how public service broadcaster C-Span has integrated Twitter, Blog coverage, Video, a Debate timeline and a keyword list into the ‘Debate Hub‘. It’s a great example of how ‘aggregation of sources of information provides a starting point for a media company to add it’s own expertise and reason to provide something of value.‘ Sorry, thought that sentence was worth highlighting, although other people have been saying the same thing for a while.

I’ve talked in the past about Twitter providing a news mechanism that trumps mainstream media for events like earthquakes. And I’ve taken a look at what mainstream media needed to do to utilise the new tools available or become increasing irrelevant.

But events like the death of Heath Ledger, or the various earthquakes around the world had a much more striking effect for those that were on Twitter at the time than for the majority of non-microbloggers waking up hours later and being perfectly happy with the coverage they were broadcast – because they weren’t up at 2am to witness how radically different it could be.

This time, it’s an event which has been flagged up in advance, allowing the word to spread – and it’s increasingly being adopted by various mainstream media sources to a greater or lesser extent, allowing far more people to see the benefits of microblogging over traditional coverage.

And I predict we’ll see more and more of this in the coming months, even with controversies like the decision from an U.S. newspaper and website to Twitter live from a child’s funeral. Whether or not it was the correct way to treat that particular situation at the current time, it’s a sign that the boundaries are shifting, and going past simply acknowledging Twitter coverage. And for microblogging to hit the mainstream, the boundaries need to be a long way further down the road than the mass adopters.

I think it’s also the reason for Twitter moving towards grouping, as much as for users. It’s why I was interested in the previously posted quote by Ev Williams, saying that groups are coming. I don’t think it’s necessarily about just Twitter for enterprise as an inward facing tool. I think in Twitter’s case it will also be about groups and tools for outward facing use by companies, which is why they’ve been seemingly slow to respond to Yammer, Present.ly etc.

It’s about raising routes to monetise from enterprise, but also providing the tools to grow the userbase to drive significant revenue. Facebook does OK at 100 million active users per month – Twitter has about 2.5 million registered used. And that mainstream exposure could be the push it needs.

Just read an interesting post by a colleague of mine about Twitter, and his belief that it really isn’t a service for conversation. It’s an opinion aired by Robert Scoble, who sees it as a broadcast mechanism for his 20,000 followers.

But David thinks differently, and explains why he believes it’s around communities of purpose in a guest post on the /Message blog.