A few weeks ago I was telling a friend about Twitter. He was very resistant because keeping up with LinkedIn, Facebook and everything else was a bit overwhelming and he didn't want add one more layer.

Fortunately there is TweetDeck, an application that you install on your PC, Mac or Linux computer.

TweetDeck allows you to see and manage not only your Twitter account but Facebook as well. It is signifcantly better and easier to use than the Twitter.com website. Here are some of the cool features:

• View Facebook status updates
• Post status updates simultaneously to Twitter and Facebook
• bit.ly URL shortener built-in to the status update bar
• Upload pictures with an easy-to-use TwitPic button
  
• One-click buttons to send replies, retweets, or direct messages.
• Email tweets to Twitter-shy friends
• TweetShrink button will shrink long updates to the 140 character limit
• Translate button with convert your update to another language
  
• Put your friends and colleagues in groups to organize their updates
• View Twitscoop and StockTwits
• ... many other features.
  

I highly recommend downloading Tweetdeck to manage your Facebook and Twitter. It is easy to use and best of all it's free. You can download the latest version of TweetDeck here.

Now if I can only convince my friend to install and learn one more program.