While this method may "work", it's really just a band-aid you have to change every 5 minutes on a sliced jugular.

The major problem is that you would have to maintain four (or whatever number of "groups" you would want) accounts instead of one. You would have to "re-follow" everyone from your main account for those particular accounts, and then keep track of new followers and new followings (because you'd most likely want your networks to continue to grow and flourish). Anyone you would follow on your main account would have to be duplicated on your "group" account. No thanks. I'd rather have a real solution.

Twittelator Pro has a "Subgroups" feature that addresses this problem, but the interface (both the app overall and the subgroups) is so unwieldy that it's almost impossible to use. Get this feature added to the otherwise-excellent Tweetie, and it would be the PERFECT app, but for now this lack of a very important and much-needed feature makes it stick out like a sore thumb.

@Jorge @Scott
I realize this is patch solution. Judging by the tools that are available right now (April 21, 2009), this is the best solution I've seen anyone propose (to fit my personal needs anyway).

@Scott, you wouldn't have to "re-follow everyone from your main account" depending on how you use it. I only have 10-20 people in each of these categories, so I only need to re-follow those 10-20 people. So if I want to see what everyone is saying, I look at my main account. If I just want to see what the Milwaukee people are saying, I look at the Milwaukee account, etc.

Also, it should be noted that I see these other accounts as read-only. I don't even pay attention to people @replying to them or new followers. In fact, all the new follower emails for those accounts go directly to the trash [who would follow an account that hasn't said anything (ever), anyway?]. All of my out-going communication comes from my personal account.

Even if a grouping feature was built into Tweetie or another comparable app, there's still the problem of setting up the groups again in the other apps you use. In my case, I use an iPhone Twitter client (Tweetie), but I also use a desktop Twitter client (Twhirl) on two different computers. Instead of me having to create groups in all of these applications (assuming it was possible), all I have to do is log into all of my accounts on each app. All those groups are maintained, cross-platform.

Take it or leave it, but this has really helped me cut down on useless Twitter noise.

This is a patch, not a solution.

Fantastic, gents. Thank you kindly.

I just set Twhirl up the same way, to have groups on the desktop. It works just as well, and the beauty is that you don't need to recreate your groups. You just use the same Twitter accounts in Twhirl.

That's almost exactly what I did. I've actually got a special gmail account set up for Twitter (here's why). When I was registering each of the Twitter accounts, I used the '+' gmail feature described by @SirCrumpet with the Twitter gmail address.

I like this idea. A lot. Is there a clean way to manage the all the unique email accounts this method (Twitter allows only one account per email address) necessitates?

Peter, If you are using gmail, this is easily solved by appending "+whatever" to your email address. So for example, you might use me+photography@gmail.com, which would be automatically redirected to your usual gmail inbox (you can then use filters to easily label messages to these addresses if you plan on using them further)..