Twitip

Which Twitter Applications have you valued the most in 2008?

Here’s a quick list of 5 that have enhanced my own use of Twitter this year and why:

1. TweetDeck

TweetDeck has become my primary Desktop Twitter client over the last 6 months of the year and has quite literally changed the way that I Tweet on a number of levels.

One of the biggest impacts that it has had is in the way that it builds ‘groups’ into my twitter workflow. This has helped me immensely to manage the noise that is associated with following and being followed by thousands of people.

Groups enable you to select any number of Twitter users to follow in a special window. This means that if you miss their twees in the ‘all tweets’ timeline you are likely to see their tweets in the group you’ve set up.

Also powerful in TweetDeck is the ‘Search’ feature which enables you to track keywords and who is using them right from within your Twitter Client.

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Twitter is a great tool for research – today Hendry Lee from BlogBuildingU.com (@hendrylee) gives the ‘why’ and ‘how’ to do it.

We have all been there. After I registered with Twitter in 2007, I sat down looking at the screen, didn’t know what to do next.

“What the heck am I going to do with 140 characters?”

I didn’t understand why people want to know when or why I just took a can of Coke. (After all, the question on the Twitter page is “What are you doing?”)

I still don’t claim to know everything about Twitter until today, even though I learn hard to understand it. Well, perhaps that is the awesomeness of Twitter. Right now, if you go to TechCrunch, starting from their home page and browsing through the archives, almost in every page you will see a mention of Twitter or one of the myriad number of Twitter-related services / tools.

It seems like every day there are new ways to use Twitter. Some of those tools stay, but a few of them are no longer with us.

There really is something in the 140 characters.

Out of those fun things to do with Twitter, one thing that I personally think most useful is using Twitter as a research tool.

Even if you just heard of Twitter right now, you can start using the data if you know where and how to get them.

This article is written to help. Because there are so many things you could do with Twitter, I will only give a few examples of using various tools for research, and leave the rest for you as an exercise of imagination.
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Today John Haydon (@johnhaydon) from Corporate Dollar looks at some tools to make you be a more useful Twitter user for your followers.

Image by me and the sysop

If you’ve been using Twitter for a while, you might notice that some of the most successful folks on Twitter make a concerted effort to help out their friends / followers. And they seem to ask for nothing in return!

Many folks believe, including me, that this practice of selfless giving is central to all success, personal and professional.

The problem is that no matter how helpful you want to be, no one’s invented a way to get 25 hours out of a day.

Until Now

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Over the last year there seems to have been a tool or service released for Twitter users every few days. There are:

• Twitter desktop clients (I’m a fan of Twhirl and TweetDeck)
• Twitter Applications for iPhone (I’m a user of Twittelator Pro)
• Twitter user ranking services (like Twitterholic)
• Visualization tools (like TweetWheel)
• Tools to import RSS feeds to your Twitter account (I use Twitterfeed)
• Tools for setting tweets to go off later (Tweetlater)
• Metrics tool (TweetStats – Twinfluence)
• Tools for sharing pictures on Twitter (Twitpic)
• Services to tweet to groups (GroupTweet)
• Twitter Directories (Twellow)
• Tools for finding new people to follow (Twubble)
• Tools for helping you to track Twitter Conversations (Tweet2Tweet)
• Trend Tracking tools for what’s hot on Twitter (Twitscoop)
• Tools to help Twitter integrate with other applications (TwitterCal – which lets you add items to your Google calandar by Twitter)
• Services for groups to tag and organize tweets (HashTags)
• Twitter updaters (Ping.fm – which allows you to update status on multiple sites like Twitter)
• Twitter backup services (TweetTake)
• Services to let you track which links people are clicking on in your Tweets (TweetBurner)

These are just some of the tools services I’ve used in the last few weeks and they only scratch the surface at the hundreds of Twitter tools that are released.

What Twitter Tools and Services do you use? Leave the ones you love in comments below.

I’m looking forward to finding out which ones get mentioned most and finding some new ones that I’d not previously discovered.