There are many listings of the plethoria of tools that have been developed for using directly or indirectly Twitter and it's many facets and features. I've decided to put together a list of what I think are the most useful of the ones I've seen & use regularly. Here's my top eleven (everyone does 10):
1. http://twittersnooze.com/ TwitterSnooze - I love this. You can pick people you are following who, shall we say, are a little over enthusiastic on the tweet front. You can 'rest' them from your news feed while not unfollowing them altogether. Genius really.
2. http://twitterholic.com/ Twitterholic - gives you the current list of who's most popular on Twitter and also let's you find out your own ranking. Rather surprisingly @stephenfry is ranked somewhere in the mid sixties at time of writing.
3. http://www.hashtags.org: “#hashtags “or 'Hash tags' – a word prefixed with the # symbol – are used by Twitterers to make it easier for people to follow key topics on Twitter. For instance, users who were tweeting about the recent Swine Flu breakout added #swineflu to their posts. hashtags.org provides an at-a-glance running ticker of popular hash tags, to help Twitter users keep up to speed with hot topics.
4. http://friendorfollow.com/ Friend or Follow - allows you to see who your following but who's not following you back (how rude). You can then manually unfollow each if you so desire or use the next tool in the Twitter arsenal...
5. http://socialtoo.com/twitter SocialToo - This tool allows you to do a host of different things automatically in Twitter. Some services, however you will have to pay for. Amongst it's features are the ability to automatically follow people who follow you and automatically unfollow people who don't follow you. I've signed up for this particular paid service as I think it's actually the most powerful Twitter application I've seen so far. You have to kick it off periodically and the script can take an eon to run but it does what it says on the tin, you'll log into your account after it's run and suddenly see you are following an equal number of people to the number who are following you.
6. http://tweeteffect.com/index.php Tweet Effect - This tool helps you to find out which of your Twitter updates made people follow or leave you. Now it's certainly an interesting incite into the way people view you on Twitter but it has to be taken with a pinch of salt. It basically suggests that for every tweet you gain or lose followers. Twitters not that straight forward in reality, people sometimes choose to follow/unfollow an the basis of other reasons not as the result of a single tweet. That being said it's still a good barometer for your news feed.
7. http://www.twitpic.com/ TwitPic - Basically this site lets you share photos on Twitter. You have a Twitter account, you therefore have an implied TwitPic account. If you send a photo from your phone or whatever to your Twitter account it gets hosted on this site. Settings allow you to either automatically post the image to your Twitter feed or manually do it at a later date.
8. http://bit.ly/ Bit.ly - a site where you can pump in your stupidly long URL and get it shortened to a much more Twitter-friendly (below the 140 character limit) length. Or alternatively there's http://tinyurl.com/ the original URL shortner
9. http://www.twitalyzer.com/twitalyzer/index.asp Twitalyzer - a tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other measures of success in social media. This one's okay but again I have my reservations. Yes they're using some interesting metrics to measure success but it seems to me that success in Twitter will always be measured by the number of followers you have, it doesn't matter which way you cook your stats!
10. www.tweetdeck.com Tweetdeck - Doesn't really need any introduction but ...it's an extremely popular desktop app that makes it easy to break feeds into manageable chunks, and even categorise replies. Requires a computer running Adobe Air, but works on both PCs and Macs.
11. http://www.twittergadget.com/ TwitterGadget - is just one of dozens of Twitter clients for iGoogle. It allows you to do almost everything you can do in Twitter but from your iGoogle homepage. You've got to be a fan of iGoogle to buy into this way of working, which I am!
Read Part Two of this post (more Twitter tools)
