Without any doubt you will agree that Twitter has become an indispensable communication tool. Some even dare call it the next email. I’ve created my account almost two years ago but only actually started using it as a proper communication tool in early 2009 and I’ve never looked back ever since.

Twitter is at this point on the rise of fast becoming the real-time, main-stream communication tool of choice. It’s quite an understatement that if you’re not on Twitter, you don’t exist.

At some point I was actively following over 500 people and the stream was fast becoming a torrent of noise. For a while I was even auto-following everyone that followed me, out of common courtesy. Guy Kawasaki is still doing this but as he points out, there is no proper or improper way to use Twitter, it’s just a matter of taste and goal achievement.

The Plan

Now, in order to filter out the noise I’ve devised a simple plan that allows me to organize the information stream and twitter lists were a great help in this (before that I was using TweetDeck groups)

First of all, with only a few notable exceptions – for direct messaging purposes, I only follow people that I’ve personally met, worked or had direct contact with. This is a common sense thing to do and it allows me to keep an excellent track of these great people and their daily tweets.

I always return the favor of following though and add all those that follow me into private lists. At this point I’d like to keep my lists private for a number of reasons, the first one being that some of them contain accounts of people that heavily compete against each other and I wouldn’t want to start debates.

The Tools

In order to use Twitter to its fullest potential I’m using a number of tools.

The one I use the most is TweetDeck. Since day one it allowed the creation of groups that was a lifesaver when lists were not available and I was following hundreds of people. Its slick columns and overall user experience are far superior to any other powertool I’ve used. I’ve also tried Seesmic a couple of times, but it doesn’t feel as good, in nine out of ten cases it’s slower than TweetDeck and most of all, it doesn’t allow that many customizations. On my netbook screen estate is gold and TweetDeck does a far better job at managing it.

For business accounts I also use CoTweet. I was one of the early testers of the service and I’ve used it daily ever since. It allows multiple users to post on behalf of one account – a feature that Twitter will soon implement itself, called contributors, assign tweets for follow-ups and set email alerts for replies & direct messages. If you’re a company that understands the power of Twitter you should really give it a try.

And of course, I’m on the road a lot, so I need to use a couple of mobile solutions as well. On the iPhone I used TweetDeck, which seamlessly integrates and syncs with its desktop counterpart. I’ve also tried Tweetie and a couple of more apps, but for the iPhone TweetDeck is my choice. I’ve recently switched over to Windows Mobile and started using the mobile version of twitter.com, which in essence is a pain, with no real advantages other than posting and viewing tweets from the people that you follow – no lists for now. I also use Pocketwit which is a bit better and I’m planning to get mu hands on a Nexus One and test out Seesmic’s android app.

ps: what you are seeing is the first theme I’ve used for my blog. A fresh one will be live in a few days.