Tool of the week for journalists: TweetDeck - for its new column filter

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Tool of the week:

TweetDeck

What is it?

Twitter's own client, which allows you to manage more than one account

How is it of use to journalists?

TweetDeck was originally created by third-party developers and after becoming a firm favourite of many, was acquired by Twitter in 2011 .

Twitter then redesigned and relaunched Tweetdeck , encouraging users to ditch the old version (the one with the yellow and black logo) and download the new app (the one with the blue and black logo). It also launched a web browser version and a Chrome app.

After many grumbled about the first version of the new TweetDeck, Twitter listened to criticism and added new features, such as a search box within the app.

On Tuesday of this week Tweetdeck announced a handy new function that allows you to filter within a column. It is currently only available in the web and Chrome versions of TweetDeck.

We are finding the new column filter extremely useful and have used the function several times this week. For example, I wanted to filter my column of favourited tweets to look for tweets mentioning tools for journalists (I knew I'd favourited a few).

All I needed to do was to

click 'edit' on the top right of the column and add a filter

.

The filter allows you to

match

words and

exclude

words, and only show tweets with

links, video

or

images

. It displays a filter alert at the top of the column so you know that you have a filter switched on.

This is a great new feature of TweetDeck. Let's hope they roll it out for the Mac and Windows apps very soon.