You can’t watch or read anything news related without it mentioning Twitter. Twitter has become the place where casual conversations occurs on a daily basis. Due to Twitter’s default settings your conversation with @name will only be seen by people who following you both.

Conversations start and someone else might want to join in if they find something interesting to comment on. Others then hop on the conversation bandwagon and it’s hard to keep up.

Twitter’s linear structure doesn’t capture these type of conversations. We see @mentions, retweets, and bits of conversation here and there, if we’re logged in. If you could follow it ‘better’ it could provide you with a lot of information. One tweeter can start a conversation about a museum they visited, an artist’s work they saw, another can chime in and inform others where else their work is currently showing or had been, or even a similar artist someone might appreciate. The list goes on about the type of information that can be had from this type of conversation or any topic. But remember unless your logged in while this is happening, you miss the entire thing.

Twitter has recently tried to group this information by allowing you to select your location for displaying local trending topics instead of global ones. What this does is allow you to see what’s going on in your area so it can be useful to you. Unfortunately, half the information might not be of any actual use because it’s not centralized to your location.  But it doesn’t matter, you still have obtained information you could pass on to others in ‘normal’ face to face conversations, you might otherwise have not known.

There have been several tools that have attempted to isolate these bits of relevant information. Here are some of those tools:

Sparse.ly –  Displays trends within people you are following so you are spared the noise of what the rest of the world is talking about.

Cadmus - An app for catching up on conversations (that you missed). You don’t have to be a part of the conversation for it to show up on your page but it will only show tweets and conversations between people that you are following.

Microchats – for moderating chats on Twitter. You can create your own public or private chats and participate in others. Provides a listing of all the lastest chats and Google Buzz too.

Mixero - Reduces the noise of Twitter information overload. It also has groups and listings management and support for several Twitter accounts, as well as Facebook, simultaneously.

via ipatrix