So post-it notes and notebooks is what Twitter is to blogs – a sort of micro-blogging that is becoming ever more popular with users.
Some have argued that all this microblogging is helping us to become less effective
But what are some of the great tools with Twitter?
We list some of our favorites below
Twitter is a great tool to keep track of your friends and associates. However, unless you are careful it can take away too much time from your workday.
To help you save time while taking good advantage of what Twitter can offer you we list a few of the tools we found to work best for us.
These are not listed in particular order and most do not require you to install anything to take advantage of them except in one or two cases an add-on is needed for your Firefox browser, so read on.
1) Update and check on your friends’ Twitter status with Twitter Fox
There are many other tools that help you send out a tweet. I like Twitter Fox because it lets me continue working and just switch over to Firefox to see what my friends are up to or else send an update myself.
This is a nice Firefox add-on.
2) Imports your feeds – matches you up with other touluu users
Based on your feeds and interests, the service will search for other users with interests similar to yours, almost like a dating service, with top matches listed first.
You have the choice of adding people as contacts, or just adding suggested feeds. If you add friends, it also compares you and gives you a match percentage, as well as suggests any of their feeds you might want to read.
3) Twubble
Twubble is a service that recommends new twitter friends to you based on the friends of your friends. It was created by Google software engineer Bob Lee in April 2008
Twubble goes through 30 of your follows who’ve updated most recently, and suggests a maximum of 100 suggestions. It then ranks them
- taking the people you like = follow, AND
- checking who of your favorites (nr. 1) follow the up to 100 suggestions
But it is, of course, a bit inbreeding because it is likely that your favorites will appreciate the same type of tweets you would. Nevertheless, you can find a few important ones that you might have missed otherwise.
PS. limiting things to 100 suggestions prevents time-outs from API calls to Twitter (always an issue) as well as any crash if you happen to be following some heavyeights (e.g., TechCrunch)
4) Use Tweed Scan to track tags or your brand such as Daimler, Mercedes-Benz
This tool searches Twitter’s public timeline for keywords or snippets of text. It helps you:
- find what people are saying about a topic or your brand – Mercedes-Benz
- find what blog posts or webpages people may have linked to in their Twitter posts,
- get a daily digest delivered by Tweet Scan directly to your e-mail in-box (who and what was posted the last 24-hours regarding this name, brand, etc.)
For instance, the above hyperlink shows you all the posts that were tagged with @forrmarketing08 in each tweed, you just type forrmarketing08 in Tweed Scan and voila.
5) Take a drive with summize – find the conversation – meme tool
This is a conversation tracker that is also quite impressive. It allows you to search for keywords user, language, attitude, tag, to and from user and so forth.
In the above URL we used again the forrmarketing08 as the keyword to find the posts that were tagged with this word. As nice as Tweed Scan. Check and compare the two.
6) IPhone works best with Pocket Tweets
While this tool is not as good as Twitter’s new mobile site for reading tweets, it still is the best way to post your tweet to Twitter from an iPhone.
7) Wanting thwirl to be able to be logged into several Twitter accounts at once
This is great if you have several Twitter accounts such as one for work, another for your pals and the third for your family only. The disadvantage is that you have to download
and install Adobe AIR 1.0 (if not already installed) first. Theafter, you can download and install thwirl.
TinyURL you need to shorten your URLs – works with Twitter Fox
You can use Tiny URL by going to their site and pasting a link into their web page to get the short URL back. Else, install the the TinyURL bookmarklet with your browser
TinyURL comes with Twitter Fox so you are covered there.
9) Tweedburner helps you track who pays attention to the URLs you tweed
this is great in more ways than one, namely
- it shortens URLS and, most importantly,
- tracks what actually happens with them once you posted them.
This allows you to see how often a link you posted has been clicked on.
Gives you a pretty good picture of what your followers are most interested in at this moment in time.
.10)
Tweetr is the tool to share files with other Twitter users
Tweetr is a mashup of Twitter and file sharing. Drag any file onto Tweetr to automatically upload your file. Tweetr will then provide you with a shortened URL that you can send to your followers via Twitter.Amazing is that it can access a webcam taking pictures to send to Twitter. File size limit is 10 megabytes.
Only disadvantage is that you have to first install Adobe AIR 1.0 to make it work.
11) TweedStats tells you more about your Twitter use
This one crates graphs and shows when you tweet the most and who has sent you the most direct messages.
The above gets you to see my personal Twitter stats.
12) Twitterholic – who has the greatest numbers of followers on Twitter
this one is neat, tells you who is following whom…. many have over 2,000 followers. Nonetheless, a small number are those with more than 10,000 people following their daily tweets, amazing.
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