A tech-savvy professor once told me if technology is not making your life easier, either it's bad technology, or you're doing it wrong. TweetDeck (desktop) (free, direct) can definitely make your life easier, especially if you worry about keeping up with social media. It can also masterfully help you or your business follow and respond to online conversations in the social media sphere.

TweetDeck is a superb application that helps you filter information from sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and a few others, feeding you only the information you want. Highly and impressively customizable, TweetDeck relieves the stress of trying to figure out how to monitor and adjust your data stream, similar to HootSuite (4 stars, free). In addition to a small, downloadable desktop client, TweetDeck is available for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Chrome. As of the time of this writing, there's also an open beta for other web browsers, including Safari, Firefox, and Opera.

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Customize Your Social Media Data Stream
TweetDeck can connect to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, and Foursquare. It supports multiple Twitter accounts in case you have more than one, like a professional account and a private one. Additionally, you can connect blogging platforms that have Twitter-compatible APIs, such as WordPress and Tumblr, letting you post to your blog directly from TweetDeck.

Download and install TweetDeck's desktop software, connect it to the social media accounts of your choice (you'll be prompted automatically when you first launch the program), and the first thing you'll notice is it organizes data into vertical columns. Each column can be customized to show whatever you want it to show, such as status updates from only selected Facebook friends or only tweets on Twitter than are directed at you.

Existing TweetDeck users should take note of a few helpful features that have been added since earlier this year. First, you can now enable Deck.ly to automatically let you tweet more than 140 characters (giving readers a URL where they can find your extended post). Second, pressing the ESC key now closes the full text preview popup. Third, support was added for previewing photos posted via Instagram. And my personal favorite, the ability to be notified in my Twitter "mentions" column when someone "favorites" my tweets.

You can add and subtract columns, customize what data they show, and the result is a snapshot view of only the social media information that's important to you. You can't adjust the width of the reading panes, however, leaving you stuck with columns of seeming equal weight. But you can change the order of the columns, letting you push out of view (because you'd have to scroll to see them) the least important columns.

Aside from making visible only what you want to see from your social media accounts, TweetDeck also lets you interact with the other sites. You can post to one or more sites, reply to posts, "like" other people's updates, mark and unmark Twitter messages as "favorite," and so on. Additional tools in the dashboard provide translation assistance and URL shortening (deck.ly). Hover over any icon and TweetDeck tells you in a few simple words its function—that's an example of great user interface design, in my mind, and one that meets TweetDeck's purpose of making my life easier.

Although the interface is remarkably intuitive and easy to learn to use, the sheer number of things you can customize could be seen by some as overwhelming. I hope in future releases that TweetDeck keeps feature-bloat in check.

Other functions that I especially appreciate are scheduling posts for later. As someone who uses social media to push articles I write, I don't want to flood my stream with my own stories. Rather than set alarms every few hours to remind me to post something that happened a few hours ago, I can use TweetDeck to queue up in advance the items I want to share and space out the times when they'll go live. TweetDeck doesn't offer analytics for what's happening in your social media world, which businesses may need. If you need data and reports, take a look at the paid version of HootSuite instead (but keep an eye on the cost of customized reports).

Should You Download TweetDeck?
If you use more than two social media sites heavily, or if you are interested in growing your presence on Twitter, try TweetDeck (desktop) for a few days. It's free, so there's no commitment. You may need to spend some time tweaking the filters you put in place, but after awhile, TweetDeck will effectively condense your river of data into something more drinkable.

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