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Tweetdeck could be my Control Panel of life

For the past week, I've used Tweetdeck to catch up on Twitter feeds at the end of the day. I follow only a handful of people so I get more quality then quantity out of Twitter, which is okay by me.

Tweetdeck lets me quickly scan my Friends twits, but also quickly see if I have replies or Direct Messages. More useful is the panels I can have for search. I can easily see new Twits from everyone, not just friends on topics of interest.

Yesterday, Google Voice stopped working with Gizmo5. Since I use Chad Smith's Google Voice Firefox Add to easily dial numbers from my work's CRM, that was a hassle. I spent the days channeling outgoing work calls to another phone, but I missed being able to use my headphones with Gizmo.

There was an active thread on the Google Voice Help Forum, but as the day wore on, no responses suggested Google Employees may not have seen the post and knew of the problem.

Finally, I had the bright idea of twitting @googlevoice and also the Twitter addresses of two Google employees I thought might be connected with Google Voice.

I fired up Tweetdeck, and hid all columns to avoid work distraction except for a search column I set up to monitor tweets to/from those accounts.

Emails were coming in all day from the thread on the help forum too. So it occurred to me, why couldn't I have the RSS feed from the help discussion come into a panel on Tweetdeck? That way I could have an entire alert panel for the ongoing issue.

Taking it further, why not, as Alex Chriss on the Tech Spheres blog suggests, have the ability to have your OPLM file of all your RSS subscriptions coming to a column in Tweetdeck? Genius.

But why stop there?

Many of us use web based email today. Have Tweetdeck have a column listing emails that are waiting in your inbox.

Or a way to have incoming IM's, missed VoIP calls, text messages, new items in my Evernote Inbox, my Delicious box, all show up?

Tweetdesk supports Twitter by letting you create twits and reply to them. It can add these other alerts without feeling the need to support the support functions to go along with them. If I see an email has come in, I can still go to my browser to reply to it.

And it would be nice if you could have everything in one combined column in chronological order, tweets, emails, rss items etc, maybe color coded. Or in multicolumn mode, select the kind of items in each column.

And maybe sound cues for incoming items with customizable sounds. Say silent for most, but a click or beep for an email or IM. And a siren for an email from an important client.

Tweetdeck is a good start. I want it to be the Control Panel for my life.
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