One of the problems with twitter is that once you follow around 50-100+ people you get overwhelmed with the conversations going on, and the slow, manually refreshing web interface hinders your ability to participate. Here are 3 tools to help you be on top of the discussions happening on twitter.

1. Quotably. This is a web service that takes the linear twitter timelines and converts them into meaningful conversation threads. It's a great way to see a ton of replies to questions asked by some more popular twitter-ers. Its really cool to see a solution, or how you stack up against some of the other replies. Check out Chris Brogan's, Scoble's Quotably page to see some examples. As an icing on the cake, you can talk to the people you do not follow directly from quotably website. The downside is, since it has to figure out how to structure the threads, pretty often it gets it wrong and while they have a system set up that fixes threading, its still a manual process.

2. Twhirl. Twhirl is a huge time saver as it brings every twitter feature to the desktop as well as include some juicy extra features. You can lookup users, view their timelines, follow them, quickly reply and direct message with just 1 or 2 clicks. The app also has pretty good keyboard shortcuts so most of the time you don't even need to use the mouse. It has a great support for multiple accounts, so if you constantly have to switch between accounts this app is a godsend. Its built on Adobe AIR and can be used on both Windows and Mac, so 98% of us are covered. Check out this great Twhirl review post by Derek from derekville.net which covers installation and basic usage. It also lists some alternative applications, in case Twhirl isn't to your liking.

3. Twinkle or Hahlo. A lot of times you are nowhere near your computer, but if you have a Jailbroken iPhone (step by step instructions how to do it can be seen here, and even computer-illiterate James was able to do it successfully), I strongly recommend app called Twinkle. Every tweet you do comes with your geo-location (if you choose to include it) and you can easily snap a pic and attach it to your tweet, bringing photo-twittering to a whole new level of simplicity. If you do want want to or cannot jailbreak your iPhone, there are a few mobile safari apps that work pretty well. My favorite is Hahlo, it has ability to add friends, view their tweets, quickly reply and of course send your own updates. If you do not own an iPhone or if you just want to send a quick update, you can always use the built-in texting support by sending a SMS message to 40404 after you set it up under device settings in your twitter account.

There has been a lot of development in the 3rd party app space for twitter lately, and some of these might change over time, but for now I believe the 3 ways above will greatly improve your participation levels as well as ability to keep on top of your twitter addictions. If you have any other essential tools that you use with twitter, let us know in the comments!