have you any wool?

I happen to love TweetDeck. It’s easily my favorite way to interact with Twitter and a great example of what an Adobe Air app can be. Much like Twitter, however, the application is free and left me wondering how they were going to monetize it. It appears they ‘may’ have found a way with rebranded installations of TweetDeck.

It would appear that the offerings from TechCrunch and Mashable are just the standard TweetDeck client with new logos, backgrounds and an addittional column – assumably an RSS feed. TweetDeck users have been asking for the ability to consume RSS feeds with the client for a while now, but I don’t imagine this is what they had in mind.

Keep in mind there hasn’t been any confirmation, that I know of, that these rebranded apps were indeed paid for by the various companies. I would be interested to find out if that’s the case or if they’re just trading them for advertising as TechCrunch and Mashable are both heavily focused on anything Twitter. I’d be even more interested to see some stats on installs of these variations compared to the standard app.

If you’re a twitter “power user” or even just an average twitter fan, you’ve probably heard of TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a desktop twitter client build on Adobe Air. Most consider it THE premiere twitter client, with Seesmic a close second.

Yesterday, TweetDeck finally released the long awaited TweetDeck for iPhone. I spent the evening toying around with the app and I must say, I’m impressed. Very impressed. The app manages to capture the look and feel of the desktop version, but also expand on it in ways that make sense on the iPhone and take use of its unique interface and user interaction.

Navigating your Incoming Tweets
Column based groups, replies and dms are all back on the iPhone app. The initial view is zoomed out and flicking left and right allows you to easily scroll through each column, each showing the last 4 tweets. Tap a column and it zooms in, revealing the rest of the tweets and allowing you to scroll through them. Zooming in also introduces left and right arrows to cycle through your column list.

Targeting a Specific Tweet
Once you’ve zoomed in to a single column and are viewing the contained tweets, clicking on a single tweet brings up a new screen. From this screen you can reply, retweet, favorite and even email the tweet. On a user level, you can also dm from this screen or click through to the user’s profile.

Groups
Groups are included just like on the desktop client and work the same way. One cool feature pertaining to groups is that when you’re zoomed into particular user’s profile, you can add them to any one or more of your groups from that screen. I think users will find this easier than having a group and trying to plug people into it, especially when you’re following people that you’re not familiar with. You can pull up their profile, see what they’re about and then categorize them from there.

Sync
Perhaps the best innovation is the ability to synchronize your columns across clients. You can now create a TweetDeck account that saves your preferences to the cloud and then syncs them to your iPhone and multiple desktop clients if you so choose.

Integration
The iPhone app supports a host of URL shrinking services and appears to default to bit.ly. It also supports TinyPic and yFrog as its photo services, though I expect more may be added later.

There are many more features not listed here that make this a great twitter app for the iPhone, if not the best. In my testing I did have the app crash a couple of times, though there have already been bug reports submitted to TweetDeck regarding the issues.

Be sure to check out TechCrunch for some video demos of both the desktop and iPhone clients.

If you’re not familiar with Twitter, you’ve obviously been living under a rock – for about three years now. I would try to explain to you what Twitter is, but there are so many other sites that do that – and better.

So once you’re on Twitter, who do you follow? Well, you’d start with you friends more than likely, family, co-workers, etc. But these are people you already know. One of the great things about Twitter is being exposed to all sorts of people that you other would’ve never know about. Sure, the chances of you following a celebrity on Twitter and actually befriending them in real life is slim to none, but it’s still fun. So where do you find the cool people? I use two sites.

We Follow – Is a site by Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, that lists the top Twitter users based on how many followers they have and also has lists of other users based on tags. So you can search the site for tags that interest you, find people who tweet about those topics, and follow them.

Favrd – Not a well know site, but more recently has gained some traffic due to Ashton Kutcher tweeting about it. The premise is this: You can ‘favorite’ tweets on twitter if you find them funny or interesting or what have you. Favrd tracks these tweets and posts them on a leaderboard, based on how many people favorite them. So by checking out the site, you can see find some very funny people, who are getting their tweets favorited all the time.

Update: 6/15

Twibes – Twitter Tribes are essentially just groups of people coming together who are interested in the same thing and would like to communicate with each other. Twibes is a searchable directory of such groups. It also streams tweets from each of the Twibe’s members so you can see what everyone is chatting about.

Google Wave. The Internet is abuzz, talking about this new product offering from the team that brought you Google Maps in 2005. Just do a search on Twitter and watch as real time updates come in just as fast as you can read them. Tweetdeck has not spoon fed me, but rather jammed down my throat, some 500 Tweets in the past hour or less since I did a search on the term “Google Wave“. Aside from the typical phrases such as “Amazing”, “Innovating”, “Game Changer” and “Revolutionary”, which all I happen to agree with, another trend seems to be emerging around the anticipation of this new communications and collaborations tool; people are all calling it a Twitter/Facebook killer.

So is it? Simply put – no.

What It Is
To be honest, it would be hard to describe Google Wave in it’s entirety because it is going to be so many things to so many people. At it’s core, it is a web communication and collaboration tool. However, as you dig deeper and learn more about what Google Wave has to offer, you’ll see it’s so much more than that. It allows the same functionality as email currently does, but with true threaded messages and conversations like a bulletin board or forum. It allows real time instant message conversations where instead of seeing “Jane is typing a message….”, you see Jane’s message as she’s typing it – character by character. It opens up the possibility of real time creation of documents, and eventually spreadsheets and powerpoints according to the Google Wave team, with multiple participants and including revision history. It’s a photo sharing tool, a comment tool for bloggers, a survey tool and even a wiki.

There are really too many benefits, features and possibilities surrounding Google Wave for me to list here, so I highly recommend you head over to wave.google.com and check out the keynote video if you haven’t already. It really is amazing stuff.

What It Is Not
Yes, Google Wave is game-changing. It is not, however, a Twitter and Facebook killer. This is my opinion of course, but bare with me. Twitter works on the premise of people wanting to communicate quickly with a huge audience and to participate in ongoing conversations with thousands of people – in 140 characters or less. The concept works, because you do not choose who you want to talk to, in most cases. You simply shout out what you want to say, via one of the many desktop clients, smart phone clients or ever twitter.com and your inner most thoughts are now out there for the world to see. The short nature of the tweets promotes quick and to the point messages which assists in near real time conversations, much like IM.

In it’s current incarnation, and from what I gather where Google Wave is heading – it will not replace this functionality. Why? Because the foundation of a Wave itself is that it’s designed to be a dialog between you and individuals you select. Do you see yourself adding 500 people to a single Wave so you can communicate with them all at the same time? Doubtful. Not to mention, you’d have to know who all those people are and that’s the beauty of Twitter; you’re shouting out into the vast unknown and people can choose to read or not and many continue to read without you ever knowing because they’ve yet to “follow” you.

This same concept is why Google Wave will not replace Facebook. Granted, Facebook is a little more targeted as you’re typically only sending status updates, links, notes, photos and survey requests to people you know and have chosen to interact with, but it still works on the same principal; most of the interaction on Facebook comes from the user “talking” to their entire entourage as a whole and then receiving feedback from selective users and continuing the conversation from there. You post a status update for your 5,000 friends to see and 2 of them choose to comment. You post pictures and share with your 500 classmates and 50 of them tag themselves at the crazy graduation party. You change your relationship status to single and you receive 70 messages in your inbox from guys who came dangerously close to committing sexual harassment at your last job, etc, etc.

In Summary
Twitter and Facebook operate under the premise that one person is communicating or sharing with many, sometimes without even knowing who they’re communicating with. Google Wave, while indeed a killer innovation in communications and something I am giddily anticipating, operates under the premise that you’re selecting those who you’re communicating/collaborating with and likely with a definitive discussion topic in mind. I suspect Google Wave will surely compliment Twitter and Facebook with embedding, client-side and server-side extensions – but a replacement, it will not be.