Twitter's a great way to keep up with your friends latest thoughts and activities -- if you have just a few friends to follow or if you spend every waking moment monitoring Twitter. But if you follow a few hundred people and happen to walk away from your computer or mobile device for more than a few minutes, odds are you'll miss a ton of messages.

CrowdStatus makes it easier to make sure you don't miss tweets, by letting you organize your contacts into groups. Say you follow 100 people, but there are 10 people whose every word you want to read, another 10 who are usually good for a laugh, but aren't as critical, and 80 who you're just following to be polite since they already followed you. You can create three different groups and when you're in a hurry, just click the high priority group to display the latest messages from your top 10 list.

You can also share your group URLs with the world, letting everyone see the latest updates from Download Squad bloggers, for example.

Another tool we ran across which lets you visualize your Twitter messages in a new way is Gridgit. It's not quite as versatile as CrowdStatus, but Gridjit displays your latest messages according to user instead of in chronological order, making it easier to track the last few messages from each of your contacts. If you're willing to give up your password, you can also post to Twitter directly from Gridjit.

[via Blog Herald and WebWare]