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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Today Mark Ramskill (@ramskill) from SubHub, takes a look at some of the steps that new Twitter users can go through to get going.

Twitter, having been quickly adopted initially by key influencers, has grown into a mass-market communication tool, with millions of users.

If you’re publishing content, undertaking online marketing, and looking to keep up with the latest trends in anything web related then Twitter should be featuring highly as a ‘weapon of choice’.

In this article I’ll be assuming you are new to Twitter, and that rather than wanting to use Twitter as a way of simply keeping up with friends, you want to use it as a tool for valuable engagement and maximum effect, avoiding the white noise that Twitter can also create if used incorrectly.

I call this ‘Using Twitter, the Smart Way’.

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In this post, Pierre Far (@pierrefar) explains how to kick start a community using Twitter. Pierre recently launched a URL shortening service with analytics called Cligs (@cligs), and used Twitter to build a community around the service. Here are his notes from this experience.

Whether you’re a startup or an established company, your customers are probably on Twitter. And whether you like it or not, they’re going to complain and praise your company and products on Twitter. Let that sink in a for a second: they’re going to complain and praise your company and products in a very public forum. There is no escaping that your reputation can be, rightly or wrongly, negatively or positively affected because of a handful of tweets.

But I’m not here to scare you into creating a Twitter profile. What I’d like to do is tell you how wonderful an opportunity this is to engage with the Twitter community, in public, and win the hearts of this community.

The Key to Community Engagement is Monitoring

To know which members of a community you need to be talking to, you need to know who’s talking about you. On Twitter, that’s quite a feat. Think about the challenge you have: Twitter has millions of users. Some are very popular with thousands of followers (i.e. very influential) but most are not that popular. Some tweet very regularly and some tweet very rarely. Some simply whine about your product, some post wishes for features, some express frustration, some give constructive feedback, and if you’re really lucky, some sing your praises. How would monitor all this activity?
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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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There are many Twitter clients available for Twitter users to download and use. Today Mike Nichols (follow him at @mikenichols0) from the Anxiety, Panic & Health blog reviews the popular Mac Twitter Client - Twitterrific.

Twitterific is the most popular Twitter client application for the Mac. It is simple, has a clean interface, and is easy and intuitive to use. It has some tradeoffs for this simplicity, as we will see. Twitterific can be used free of charge without limitation, but advertisements are displayed once per hour. If you pay the IconFactory $14.95 US, ads are removed. Twitterific is available for the iPhone and iPod Touch, as well.

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Today Jeff Chandler (@jeffr0) provides us with one of the most popular Twitter Clients – Twhirl.

Back on November 10th, Darren did a reader poll where he asked, Do You Log Into Twitter.com To Tweet? So far, I sometimes use twitter.com and sometimes a client is in the lead with 430 votes. However, I always login to twitter.com is in second place with 247 votes. This review of Twhirl should provide insight into what those who are not using this client are missing.

Start From The Beginning:

Thanks to the API and the tremendous amount of third party support for Twitter, end users have a ton of options to choose from when it comes to accessing Twitter from something other than the Twitter.com website. There are FireFox extensions such as Tweetbar and TwitKit, sending tweets via cell phone etc. However, the focus of this review will be centered on Twhirl which is a desktop application built on top of Adobe AIR. In order to install and use Twhirl, you’ll need to first download and install the Adobe AIR framework.. Adobe Air is available for Windows 2000; Windows XP; Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise; and Mac OS X v10.4 or 10.5. The Linux release of Adobe AIR is under development.
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I’ve added a new poll to our sidebar poll rotation (there are two now). This one is attempting to gauge how many people actually log into Twitter.com to Tweet and how many people use some kind of external client (like Twhirl, TweetDeck, Ping.fm etc).

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Once you’ve voted – tell us which client you use in comments below.

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.