There is a feature on Twitter called Favorites. You can make a tweet a Favorite and share it with others, or just go back and read it later.

One of the problems with this is trying to sort through all your Favorites at once. If you are like me, you tend to mark tweets as Favorites so you can come back to them later. As a result, I have pages and pages of them.

I have just discovered that you can see your Faves as an RSS feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. If you are older than 30, think of those electric ticker tape signs. If you are under 30, you probably know what it is.

Simply type into your browser,  http://twitter.com/favorites/(your Twitter name).rss . That will bring up all your faves in an easy to read stream of links.

If you are following more than 100 people on Twitter, you know how hard it is to keep track of who said what. The best application I have found for this is TweetDeck. TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR application (which means you have to download the AIR software onto your computer) that lets you see in table form at least 3 columns. The default columns are “Friends”, “Replies”, and “Direct Messages.”  You can build your own column  as a Group (the tab is at the top of the application). Fo example, my Group are the followers I am most interested in. I named the Group, and then selected the Twitter names that I wanted in the group. The program does the rest.

You can also change the colors of the application.

I highly recommend this desktop app for keeping up on what is happening day to day on Twitter.

Twitter does have search available since they bought the site Summarize. To access the Twitter Search, go here . The page allows you to search by topic, and has a list of the current trends at the bottom.

Someone figured out that if you put the # in front of a term, people could find it quickly here. Voila! The hashtag was born. (The term may have originated from somewhere else, I’ll look into that.)

So, when a number of people are at a conference, such as BlogWorld Expo, they try to agree on a single tag and then place it somewhere in their tweets, like this #BWE08. This allows others to find their comments under one search instead of having to do variations on the name of the conference.

Some people have gotten a tad crazy with hashtags (IMHO), tagging everything they think is useful for others. A number of people have put together online parties by using the hashtag so that others can see who is online without following them. Warren Whitlock put such a party together over New Year’s Eve by using the tag, #Happy09.

When you post a note on Twitter, it is called a “Tweet.” The Tweet or post can only be 140 characters, which is why Twitter is referred to as micro-blogging.

People on Twitter are known by the “@” symbol and whatever they call themselves.  If you are curious about someone, you can click on their name and see their profile.

If you feel overwhelmed by the number of Tweets coming at you, you can make some of them Favorites and come back to them later. On the Twitter website, you will see a star in the upper right hand corner of the post. If you click on that, the star turns yellow. You have now made that post a Favorite. To access these posts on the website, look on the right side of the page and you will see a link labeled “Favorites.” Click on that, and it will bring up a list of the Tweets you starred. When you are done reading a tweet, merely click on the star again and it and the note fades away.

If you are using TweetDeck (and I will be doing a review of this application later), you can mouse over the avatar (photo or drawing of the person) and you will see a heart. That is also for making a favorite out of a Tweet. When you click on the heart, the dot next to the person’s name disappears.