Everyone is talking about Twitter these days, but despite the service's insane popularity, its chaotic default Web interface doesn't do much to simplify working with it. If you'd like to manage your Twitter experience better, try the free Twitter client TweetDeck . It displays your friends' tweets, corrals your mentions, tracks searches, and has tools for shortening links, posting pictures, and more.

If you want to keep an eye on what the Twittosphere has to say but you don't want to check it constantly, consider signing up with TweetBeep , a service that sends you a daily digest of Twitter posts matching any number of search criteria you select. It's all the tweets without all the distraction.