I have been putting together a top ten Twitter tools list. First of all I would like to say that I never realized there were so many 3rd party Twitter applications out there. A lot of them are duplications of each other albeit some may have a small twist that discerns it from others.

I have broken them down into several categories. Functionality, automation, and design. My favorite so far is a program that falls in the functionality category called Tweet Deck. Tweet Deck puts your Twittering on steroids.

It opens a window that lets you create columns that you can customize and filter for example, when I am Twittering I have a column of "All Friends" which is what you would normally see, a column with "Replies" (same as the replies page in Twitter), but then I have one for "Fortunate 500" which are the students in Alex Jeffreys first coaching class, and then I have a column that is just a few select friends.

Pretty cool but this is only one feature. In the columns you see the avatar and tweets like normal Twittering. If you mouse over the avatar, 4 buttons pop up. Reply to this person, Direct Message to this person, Retweet this persons tweet, and Other Actions. The other actions brings up a drop down list with Follow, Unfollow, Email Tweet, translate, untranslate, add to group(column), view profile, search, favorite, mark as read, and delete.

At the bottom of each column are some more buttons that do the following: move column left, filter the tweets in this column, mark all as seen, clear seen tweets, clear all tweets, move column right. But wait there is more.

At the top of the window is another row of navigational buttons. These buttons open up the various columns like, replies, direct messages, groups, etc.. There is also a button that opens Twitscoop which is a "tag cloud" of sorts that shows you what everyone is tweeting about. Another button takes you to 12 second TV, which may give Twitter a run for its money if it catches on.

There is a button that takes you to StockTwits and to the top right are 4 more buttons which are Refresh, single column view, settings, and Logout. The most important button is the first button up top which is the Tweet button.

This opens a standard Tweet type box but it has a couple really neat features. There is a place below the box where you can enter a URL then click on a button and it will shorten the URL and insert it into your tweet. There is also a TwitPic button that will take a picture from your computer and load it to TwitPics while creating a nice little short URL in your Tweet to the picture.

Have you typed in to many characters? Not a problem. The box will turn red, letting you know that you have exceeded the 140 character limit. But not to worry. There is a button called Tweet Shrink which will automatically make your Tweet fit.

Last but not least there is a recent hash tags button. Tweet desck is easily my hands down winner for ease of use and functionality. You can do almost everything you need to do right from the one window. Of course, like most Twitter apps, it's free.