This is awesome. TweetDeck, my favorite Twitter client, now added support for LinkedIn, my favorite business development networking tool! Now you can follow your connections’ activity feeds in realtime. Every time someone joins a company, updates their profile, answers a question, updates their status, etc, Tweetdeck updates to reflect the change and it makes it easier to get a sense of what’s going on day by day. I’ve actually spotted many layoffs and studio closures first through LinkedIn based on the type of activity that happens immediately before and after.
I’ll explain what TweetDeck is. It’s a full-featured, well-designed and easy to use Twitter client that has support for not only Twitter but also Facebook, MySpace and now LinkedIn as well. It provides a customizable multi-column view with many configuration options and special filters. You can customize which types of notices it shows you, such as Status, Q&A, Connections, Profile updates, Recommendations, Group joinings, and Application installs.
It’s becoming flexible enough that even if you hate Twitter, you can simply not use Twitter at all and instead use TweetDeck as simply a nearly-live news ticker of information from ONLY LinkedIn. It can be a tremendously useful business intelligence tool. :)
Here’s a screenshot of the TweetDeck interface: http://assets.tweetdeck.com/splashes/frontpage.png
To give you an example of how it can be used, I use TweetDeck for both Twitter and LinkedIn. I’ve set up several different columns with various filters:
- One for my full Twitter feed (~400 people)
- One to collect all replies to my tweets
- One for all my private messages
- One for all the Twitter news sites I follow
- One for my close friends
- One for LinkedIn
In other words, the whole world at my fingertips! bwahah!
TweetDeck is available for PC, Mac, and the iPhone, and your custom columns \ filters \ etc are synced to the server so they’re the same on every device you use it on, which is slick. :) You can download it here: http://www.tweetdeck.com
Enjoy!