One of Clay Shirky's many provocative pronouncements on social media and Internet culture is that <a href="http://web2expo.blip.tv/file/1277460/">It's Not Information Overload; It's Filter Failure</a>.

TweetDeck enables you to setup general filters as well as individual filters for different columns, each of which can be associated with a specific Twitter List, hashtags or search term. The filters allows you to supress tweets based on text, username, source (e.g., Twitter app ... such as TweetDeck) or time.

I find this useful to temporarily reduce my exposure to overtweeting by individuals or groups of Twitter users, which tends to flare up when one or more of the people I follow attend a social media conference or event (a violation of rule #3 in <a href="http://theoatmeal.com/comics/twitter_stop">The Oatmeal's 10 Things You Need to Stop Tweeting About</a>).

TweetDeck provides many other features that are shared by other apps (e.g., the ability to reply, retweet, direct message, follow, unfollow, etc.), but it is this filtering capability that makes it stand out (for me).

I love using TweetDeck. I really started to understand and use Twitter after I downloaded it. The ability to see your direct messages, replies, and custom searches is invaluable to actually use Twitter. You might miss one using Twitter's site, but TweetDeck pulls them out and saves them. The iPhone application works great, uses the same familiar interface. Sometimes it doesn't sync perfectly with the desktop client, but it works well enough. I would recommend that anyone who wants to really use Twitter check out TweetDeck.