Twitter tools and sites

Wow, again I write about Twitter. This is becoming a Twitter blog. Well, what can I say – I like Twitter, and spend a large portion of my time there – naturally it’s something I think a lot about. Next post won’t be about Twitter (my promise to myself).

 
Although I’ve seen articles that list useful Twitter sites (and/or tools), I find that many of them don’t have a lot of value. Consequently, I thought I’ll share my own list, which I’ve created for my own usage.

 

Tools:

I only use a single tool, TweetDeck, which is a fantastic tool that allows you to do everything the web interface allows you, but much much more. Phrased differently: the web interface is not really practical, you need something like TweetDeck to really be able to benefit from Twitter if you have more than a few dozen followers. What I particularly like is the ability to create ‘columns’ where only certain friends, or certain search terms appear – though you can still see the Twitter timeline if you want. As a result, it allows you to focus on what you find interesting, while still benefiting from the whole.

 
There are many free & paid Twitter tools, but I don’t find them useful (i.e. TwitterLocal, etc)

 

Sites:

 

  1. Search.Twitter.com: a must. Twitter’s internal search engine. Brings you discussions that occurred in the past few seconds. Hey Google, can you do that?

     

  2. Friend or follow: shows you the people you follow but haven’t returned your follow, and the opposite as well (the site refers to them as ‘fans’). Very useful if you like to get followed in return for following someone.

     

  3. Backupmy.net: one of my favorites. Twitter only backs up your last 3,000 tweets. However, if you write a lot of interesting tweets, have multiple conversations you’d like to keep, or just like having your tweets stored, this site allows you to do this for free. I downloaded all my tweets and it was pretty amusing to see my first tweet back in March… I was so young and naive.

     

  4. Twitter grader: I actually thought of dedicating an entire post to this site. This is a ‘grading site’ of sorts for Twitter users. Basically, based on certain factors (number of followers, number of tweets, number of retweets, number of recent tweets, etc) it assigns each user a score. Moreover, it allows you to see the global top users, top users in your country, state, and city. I think their algorithm is significantly flawed and has multiple problems. However, it seems to be popular, so I occasionally check myself as well. I didn’t write the post about this because I suspect this may be a post that only interests me (.. I am an ex-computer scientist after all, so algorithms still appeal to me). If there’s anyone interested, I’ll be more than happy to write why I think this site’s algorithm is so wrong. One day I’ll create a site that will really enable ‘measuring’ individual users.

     

  5. Twitoria: allows you to find users that haven’t updated their pages for a given amount of time. If they’re not your personal friends, you may want to remove them from your list.

     

  6. My Tweet Space: fantastic tool for creating Twitter backgrounds. Highly recommend, and many thanks for the good folks over there that allow us to use it for free.

     

  7. Twitterfeed: allows you to feed your blog directly into Twitter. Some WP plugins allow you to do that as well, but this is another way. Although I don’t currently use it, I intend to use it in the very near future.

     

  8. Future Tweets: allows you to schedule future tweets. I’ve only used it once and it seemed kind of cool, but didn’t really feel the need to use it since then. Maybe I’ll use it again in the future.

     

  9. Topsy: a search engine for tweets – allows you to find out how many times a tweet has been retweeted. Pretty cool.

     

  10. Stuff to Tweet: shows you the coolest tweets. Can’t say I’ve really used it, though at times it’s interesting to see what’s popular.

     

  11. Revtwt: Although I’ve not used this myself, I think it’s fair that I include it just because many people would find it interesting. In short, the site allows you to make money from your tweets. I don’t think a lot of money, but if you have many followers, this can accumulate to a respectable amount, I hear.

 
Please let me know if you think I’ve missed an important Twitter site or tool. There are several more in my list I don’t find that useful, but I discover new ones almost on a daily basis.