You may or may not believe this, but I don’t like being on the cutting edge. I mean, I liked The Cutting Edge, but I’m usually hesitant to try new technologies the instant they come out. Even though Twitter is new to about 90% of the people I talk to, I joined Twitter nearly a year ago (I had to look up my first tweet), so I’m still far ahead of the popularity Twitter has received since the New Year. As I try to educate friends and family and coworkers about Twitter, I find myself trying new Twitter clients and services nearly every day, and my eyes search urgently for any Twitter news in gReader. I’m so excited about Twitter that I even started a Twitter account just so I can tweet about twittering. As I told my mom and Chris, I am an unstoppable Twitter monster.

But I’ve also become the go-to resource for Twittering among my circle of peeps. I find myself repeating the same things over and over again as I explain Twitter to them and recommend tools to make it work for them. Most of these things have made their way into the little Twitter project Linden and I are working on, but some are worth discussing today, especially in light of how I’m using them to manage eight Twitter accounts (at the time of this posting), both personal and work-related. Today, I thought I would share three of the tools I’m currently swearing by in my management of Twitter.

HootSuite
Hootsuite is the first Twitter tool I grafted into my Twitter habit, so I’ve been using it the longest. This web-based service allows users to manage multiple Twitter accounts from one dashboard, and it lets them add editors to specific Twitter profiles. Though HootSuite is still in beta and has had several scheduled and unscheduled down times in the last few weeks, there’s lots of promise for this tool. The HS team is especially deliberate in notifying users of outages and in conversing with users about problems, ideas, and other feedback.

Features I Love

• Scheduling tweets to post in the future
• Stat tracking of ow.ly-shortened URLs
• Monetizing of ow.ly URLs with Google AdSense
• Auto-initialing tweets for editors

Features I’m Waiting For

• TwitPic functionality
• Ability to add existing HootSuite users as editors to my account
• Cross-profile stats, so profiles can be compared against one another

TweetDeck
I adopted TweetDeck a few weeks ago in an effort to find a tool that would automatically update itself when new tweets came in. You see, I’m not a fan of going to Twitter or HootSuite every few minutes and hitting F5 to see if I have updates. If I have to go anywhere to get the information that I think should be coming to me, well, no thank you. TweetDeck uses Adobe Air and is a light-weight desktop program that posts a small notification in the upper-right corner of my screen when a new tweet comes in. I use TweetDeck only for my personal account, the one with all my friends and co-workers, since I want to be “on” Twitter with that account most of the time.

Features I Love

• Multiple panels/columns for organizing tweets however I deem they need to be organized
• Ability to view profiles and follow from within TweetDeck
• Grouping my friends
• Hashtag links to Twitter search

Feature I’m Waiting For

• Multiple profiles management
• Scheduling posts in the future

Twhirl
Started trying Twhirl just this week because it allows you to manage multiple profiles from your desktop. Like TweetDeck it uses Adobe Air to keep the program low on memory usage, and it automatically notifies me of new tweets to my open profiles. Even though I haven’t used it long, here’s what I love about it:

• Multiple profiles management
• Tight notification control
• Flexible and movable profiles

I haven’t identified any features I want in Twhirl, maybe because I haven’t used it for long. Already, I’ve decided that I like working with TweetDeck over Twhirl, but I really need to have the live interactivity with multiple accounts right now, and HootSuite doesn’t offer live interactivity. So I’m stuck managing Twitter with all three of these tools for now. Since Twitter is still relatively new, these tools are, too, and I’m sure they’ll grow with Twitter along the way.

I’m always on the lookout for new tools people use to make Twitter work for them, so if you come across something you love, send it my way.