140Char

Tweetdeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that brings Twitter to the desktop of Mac and PC in the most readable format yet.

Tweetdeck uses column layouts to arrange Tweets however you like. The default columns are All Tweets, Replies, Direct, but Tweetdeck’s functionality allows you to add/remove columns and custom ‘build’ your own columns – even group certain Twitter users to their own column.

It also gives you on screen notifications of new Tweets and incorporates an optional column to display a Twitscoop keyword cloud to show you what the biggest keywords are on Twitter right now.

The interface is sleek and Web 2.0 style. Columns can be resized or rearranged by dragging. You can also Tweet directly from the application of course, and it has built in shorten url functionality and Twitpic.

The only thing I would say it lacks is highlighting of new Tweets, which I greatly appreciate from Socialthing.

I’m obviously a big fan of microblogging, having started this site with a few good people. And yet the current buzz around the concept does bring some of the problems to the forefront.

For starters, how fragmented will my identity become? I already have another blog, a profile on LinkedIn, a profile on a group magazine project, a profile on Facebook, one on Myspace, and one on Twitter. And that’s just the main sites I use on a day-to-day basis. And any reasonable input into microblogging requires a lot of time – enough to have an effect on the blogging output of a lot of people. Although surprisingly it can have a positive effect.

But until now, Twitter has been synonymous with microblogging. But with new challengers coming every day, is it really possible to comprehensively update:

• Twitter
• Plurk
• Twoorl
• Identi.ca
• Globme
• Jaiku
• Pownce

And still have time to check other comments on Friendfeed and Socialthing?

You can always try cross publishing, and the number of posts brought to you by services like Ping.fm has radically increased. But is it really worth autofeeding yourself across so many networks? In the early stages the same early adopters will inhabit most of these sites, so you’re likely to be bombing most of the same people several times.

Or you can try and manually update each site, and unless you’re able to multitask to the nth degree, you can drive yourself insane within a week.

Luckily the answer to the problem will arrive eventually in the self-selection of the main sites. And that will simply come down to where the groups of friends exist. That’s why I think Twitter is secure for quite a while longer, as most people will have already reached a critical mass of connections that they won’t find on the other networks yet.

The issue it does raise, is a wider one, on how many different identities and personas are possible around an individual with even a wide sphere of influence and a lot of spare time – and where will that time come from?