My favourite thing of 2008: Tweetdeck. While the community is abuzz about Twitter, I personally am a huge fan of the many applications that have been developed for it. I especially find Tweetdeck to be one of the best applications.
Tweetdeck is a desktop application (built on Adobe Air so it is cross-platform compatable) that lets you keep track of your main tweetstream, public replies to you, tweets that include your @name and private direct messages all in a single interface. But that's not all!
Do you follow a lot of people and find it hard to keep track of the conversations?
This is Tweetdeck's greatest strength. It allows you to segment or "bucket" the people you're following into groups. Tweekdeck collects the tweets from your group members into separate areas in the interface so that you can easily scan the conversations that are happening. Tweetdeck's groups are totally self-defined so you can organize them according to what makes sense to you.
Tweetdeck was developed by @IainDodsworth and if you ask @Tweetdeck a question, or suggest an enhancement, they're really open to feedback and are quite responsive.
Rebecca blogs at The Direct Approach. Her most popular post this year was Increasing Subscribers is More than Offering Incentives. Of course, if your incentive is a lamp shaped like a sexy leg, your subscriber list is guaranteed to triple.