Are you on Twitter?

A little more than a year ago Jerry, from the Stogie Review, and mentioned to me that he was using this service called Twitter to keep up with friends and co-workers. He explained it in such a way that I viewed it as a sort of large chat room from my old AOL days.

I checked it out and wasn’t totally convinced. I saw it as a service along the lines of Myspace, which I never could stand. As Jerry became more and more involved with it, I started using it as a way to get answers to simple questions faster than we normally would communicate over email.

For the longest time I was simply using the web interface to check my tweets and send little tid-bits. The more I grew attached to Twitter, the more interested I became in applications to make it run smoother.

The application that I experimented with was called TwitterFox. This was a Mozilla Firefox addon that updated every so often and popped my messages up in the lower right corner of the screen. This was great when I had my browser running.

After passing on TwitterFox, I checked out an Adobe Air application called Twirl. This was a straight forward piece of software that kept tabs on my twitter stream, responses, and direct messages. I used this for a while until Jerry turned me on to a more robust application called TweetDeck.

TweetDeck was a little intimidating at first, with all of its panes and buttons. It took up a massive amount of screen space and I didn’t expect to use it for very long before ditching it for something new. I contemplated going back to Twirl until something else of interest popped up, but I started taking a liking to this new application.

Since I started using TweetDeck, I’ve found its URL shortening service very convenient as well as its ability to create panes on the fly. I can setup groups to keep track of certain people or even setup a search which updates frequently in order to find new people to follow.

Since my trial run of Twitter, I’ve become a bit of a Twitter Junkie. I log on via the web interface several times per day while at work and generally have TweetDeck running while I am home. Its been a great way to keep up with the growing cigar community and to meet new bloggers.

Now that I use it so much, I don’t know what I would do without it. Since getting my iPod Touch, I even check in from my local cigar shop to see what is going on.