Posting Statuses To Twitter At The Perfect Time – Timely.is

You might never have stopped to think about this, but… are you tweeting at the right time? I mean, to the vast majority of people, using Twitter amounts to nothing but tweeting something when they feel like doing it, and trusting their followers will get the message, read it and process it.

The truth is that sending a tweet when nobody is around is almost the same as not sending it. The tweet will become buried by all the messages that come after it. That is a simple, unavoidable fact.

And that is what Timely is here to address. It is a web application that can take care of scheduling all your tweets, and sending them when they would reach out to more people. Once you give Timely access to your Twitter account, the application will take care of analyzing the last 200 tweets you have sent, and figure out the best time slots for anything you want to send in the future.

If this sounds good to you, then you will be happy to know that Timely is a free service. Timely will analyze all your tweets and figure out what times of day you get the best engagement and then auto schedule your tweets for those best periods of the day. As your followers grow, Timely will adapt and learn what new times might be best. The app also provides tweet analytics and performance insights that shows you how you’re doing (including click-throughs and audience reached).

In a nutshell: If you send out multiple Tweets at once, it could annoy some of your followers. There’s also the risk that your Tweets could be pushed to the bottom of their feeds if they aren’t constantly reading their feeds. Timely helps fix that by scheduling your Tweets, and has the added benefit of some light analytics afterwards.

It is also a fantastic app for those managing multiple Twitter accounts who wants to optimize when their tweets are scheduled. The Timely bookmarklet makes for a nice work flow where you can fill up your queue of tweets quickly and then let Timely find the best time to tweet them out (and you can change between accounts with a single click). Great for community managers and others who want to share helpful links on Twitter without spending all day on it.

Posting Photos To Twitter With No Ads – Posterous

Posterous you say? I thought that was a blogging platform? Fear not, I mentioned that these would be creative tools, so read on to find out more about how to implement Posterous. There are a lot of ways to share photos with your followers on Twitter. Posterous, however, has a position in the photo sharing market that makes it truly the best option for sharing photos are Twitter, one that offers numerous advantages to you as a user and blogger.

If you have made your decision to start blogging through a tumblelog and you chose to use Posterous, you already have a distinct advantage to sharing your photos on Twitter through Posterous: your followers will be linked to your blog to view the photos and not to some 3rd party application like TwitPic.

This is advantageous in many ways: the foremost way being you allow users to check out a separate blog in addition to photos. Your blog can contain much more than just the photos that you’ve sent to Twitter! Services like TwitPic offer the bare minimum; pretty much only photos you upload to them which can be shared one at a time, and nothing else.

Many of these services are ridden with ads and look very cluttered and tacky. Meanwhile, using the “Clean Sheet” or one of Posterous’s other sleek themes will allow you to share your photo content on a nicely laid out on a blog style page with no ads and no distractions. You will notice Rainn Wilson from “The Office” does this on his Twitter. The benefits do not end here however.

Posterous offers the option to upload multiple photos at once and have them automatically appear in a very sleek slide show display. No more spamming your followers with shortlinks, simply upload a few photos that you took at the moment or recently and send one link out via Posterous to Twitter and give you followers a few things to check out. This makes your photo Tweets much more entertaining and worthwhile.

Additionally, you photos will display in a clean timeline. Posterous offers the aforementioned blog style layout, so your other photos display in date order for your users to check out. So after a person is linked to a photo of yours via Posterous, they now have access to the rest of your photos in a timeline style.

Lastly, you can add commentary to the photos in Posterous to give your readers a little more insight. This is another ability that adds value per Tweet. Gone are the days of “Here is me _______ – [shortlink]”, now you can upload photos and stay in the 140 character limit on Twitter while adding additional content on Posterous, giving your readers more context and description. It is also something that adds optional depth to readers they are interested.

Getting More Followers On Twitter By Sharing Content – CloudFlood

As you know, being a power user and having an impact on Twitter means that you need followers. Having a large follower base on Twitter means your tweets will reach as wide an audience as possible: not only your followers, but those who they retweet it to.

Having a large base on Twitter also allows you to inform people of other ventures that you are apart of, site as a new site or new release of something. One great method for gaining peoples interest is a “freebie”, giving something away in order to get something small back from the user, possible an email address, or maybe… even a tweet spreading word about whatever your new endeavor is.

Enter Cloud:Flood. To maximize the number of people who tweet about whatever page you’d like to direct them to, follow three easy steps to implement the Cloud:Flood app in perfect form: first, create a free product you want to give away to your website visitors. It could be an eBook on your chosen topic, an MP3 or even a Zip file full of PSD’s.

Then, make a button on the Cloud:Flood site, linking to the file you want to give away, and a page to promote (this can be any page you want, whether it is a new site, a new product, a new post…anything!). You then place the button that you just made on Cloud:Flood next to the freebie offering on your site.

Site visitors see the freebie, and are asked to Tweet or FB Share your link in order to get it. People love getting something for free, so from my experience, this has a high conversion rate: why would your followers pass up something free from you if all they have to do is send out a tweet or Facebook share? Once they share your link, they are automatically given the freebie.

You both win here: your followers get something for free, and you get free, guaranteed promotion on Twitter through their tweets, which you can set (you enter a predefined message to be shared before you make the button). Start up your next big project with a huge boost from Twitter with this technique, and you’ll be glad you did! Not only will you get eyeballs from Twitter visitors on a page you desire, but if you have the predetermined message mention your name, you’ll gain followers as well. So get to work on your next freebie, and let Cloud:Flood do the rest.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



3 Creative Tools For Power Twitter Users

Messages exchanged during conversation are not stored or published on the web or anywhere else.

Bidirectional relationships (people followed and following you) are set as chat friends so if you are a massive twitter user with tons of followers don’t expect to see them if you are not following them. Unfortunately, this service is probably unusable with classic client software if you have thousand of bidirectional relations.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Twitter XMPP Instant Messaging with Treegger

The difference between marketing methods of old and social media marketing is that customers have a say. The success of a social media campaign is dependent not upon how much money is spent, but upon the people being marketed to. If the message works and they like the product, the masses will Tweet it to the rest of the masses. If it doesn’t, the campaign might not even get past the initial push, and will likely spiral into oblivion.

It’s All about the People

There’s one factor that you can’t control, and that’s people. Knowing that, you have to make the most of what you can control, which are the tools at your disposal. In this case, we’ll be talking Twitter, but it also works for Twitter, Facebook, Email Marketing, and video.

So how can you use Twitter for a product launch? Well, there are the obvious methods, such as using the TweetMeme plugin on your blog and product pages. People love to click these because it’s so simple, and I’m really amazed when I find a blog that doesn’t use it.

Forcing Your Hand

Another option is to create your own banner, with a built in link pointing to your launch page. Again, this works well because people can simply click and go…there’s no work involved. My friend Mike and I implemented this recently for our launch and within just a few days have noticed a huge difference in the buzz around our product.

But just creating the banner might not be enough. If you want to create a contest or track the amount of ReTweets, you’ll need a hashtag or custom URL. We created both, so that we could track each message that we create. This is an example of setting a control, so that you can not only track the results, but split-test what works best. If one hash tag isn’t working well, you can try another. If one of your URL’s isn’t seeing the amount of on-page action that you’d like, you can adjust your copy to fix it.

Real Time Tracking

Once you have your campaign in place, and you’ve set the parameters, you need to find a way to track the activity. This is where Twitter Search comes in quite handy.

However, since I’m not a huge fan of Twitter’s interface, I prefer to use clients like Tweet Deck or Seesmic to create custom searches. Of course, I’ll create a panel for my hashtag and possibly my URL, but I don’t stop there.

The next step is to set up a Google Alert, using those same queries, so that you can catch any instances that Twitter Search might miss. This also allows you to capture the activity of sites like Topsy, which republish popular Tweets. Although Twitter Search will capture most of your action, Google Alerts will pick up the stragglers for you.

Real Time Display

Lastly, if you really want to take advantage of Twitter to capture the buzz and hype around your product launch, then it’s time to show the world what everyone is saying. You can do this easily by creating a custom search (they call them groups) in Tweetizen and then embedding the results on sales and contest pages.

This does a number of things for you:

• It provides social proof
• It creates scarcity, which is a great way to capture a buyer’s attention
• It creates a sense of belonging when people see their name in the results

I’ve seen a number of products use this recently, and even as someone that’s used to seeing this sort of thing, I was impressed by the sense of belief I had when viewing the results.

The Total Package

If you implement these techniques in your launch, you’ll have a set of controls that you can test and manipulate, which will help you know very quickly if your launch is going to be a hit. If you don’t see the activity you were hoping for, then you can either adjust your campaign or scrap it for another.

If you pull it off, and the launch builds momentum, then you might get lucky enough to make the Twitter Trends list or get featured on a social media blog, like Mashable.

The great thing about strategies like this, is that you don’t need any cash to get started, yet you can compete with anyone on the Web. Now that’s power.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



How to Use Twitter for a Product Launch

I recently got myself a brand new twitter account! Yeah I can hear the gasps already, ‘How could I abandon my followers like that’? Well before we get judgmental and call me a Twitter traitor, let me tell you about my old account and what prompted my move.

The Twitter Trap

I joined twitter for the first time about a year ago, at the time I was just getting into social media – a relative newbie. I was however savvy enough to know that the info was out there for me to find, so I set out to learn how to use twitter properly. I started learning how to get followers as well as who to follow myself, I read about how to tweet, when to tweet and what to tweet. I joined all the ‘popular’ twitter services, Twollow, Twitter Grader (and many others), I tried out TweetDeck and Twhirl. I was steeped in Twitter culture and my account was growing by leaps and bounds. Before I knew it I had 5000+ followers and was following over 4500 people. My twitter client was always on and I was tweeting 20, 30 or more times a day, I was talking to all sorts of people about all sorts of stuff. And despite all of this I was finding that I was not really satisfied with the whole twitter experience. Where were the deep connections that all the ‘experts’ were talking about where was the ‘value’, why was I doing this anyway? Sound familiar?

I didn’t really understand what the problems were until I decided to engage in a retrospective of my Twitter experience. For those who don’t know this is a software development concept where you look back and try to identify problems to see what can be improved (as well as identifying things that went well so that you can keep doing them). I identified several problems and I believe these don’t just apply to me but to many people who join twitter and get caught-up in the excitement before they really know what’s what.

The Issues (Almost Everyone Faces)

• Mass following people. I don’t mean mass following spammer-style, but following dozens of people a day is still mass following. You don’t really know who you’re following, there is no time to find out, and you don’t know why you’re following them, you just know you need to follow people, all the experts say so.
• Following people for no other reason than to get a follow-back.
• Following everyone that anyone recommends.
• Not filtering your own list of followers. Who else is being followed by several hundred bots and spammers (don’t be shy raise your hand, you know it’s pretty much all of you)?
• Spamming your followers twitter stream with anything and everything you can find. What you’re doing, what you’re reading, what other people are doing and reading, all day long…
• Retweeting not because you like the content, but because you need something to tweet and if someone else retweeted it, then it must be great.
• Relying completely on a twitter client (TweetDeck) because there is no other way to keep a handle on your account
• Making at best superficial connections with your followers, and at worst no connection at all.

This is where I was and this is where I think many people are. Your twitter account is bloated with thousands of useless followers, people you never engage with, people who you don’t really care about and who don’t really care about you. You never see 99% percent of your stream since you get hundreds of tweets per hour despite the fact you’re on twitter all the time.

What Others Were Doing

Then I heard about a new trend where some people would try to ‘restart’ their account by un-following everyone they were following. I found that I had an ethical problem with that, it seemed somewhat duplicitous to un-follow people like that, after all you were both playing the game (follow me and I’ll follow you), but you decide to change the rules without telling everyone else. And what’s the point anyway, all you get is hours of effort wasted un-following everyone, but the people following you care about you just as little as they did before. This is where I had a revelation. Rather than ‘restarting’ your current account, why not phase it out and get yourself a new one. You give all your followers the opportunity to keep following you on your new account as you slowly abandon your old account over the course of a few weeks. You get to keep the followers who actually care about you and you get the benefit of a clean new account.

The Brand New Account

So we’re back at the start of this post, I’ve got myself a brand new twitter account. These days, I am not a social media newbie any more, in fact I am pretty savvy. I’ve read all the experts and have drawn my own conclusions I know how to handle a Twitter account (or any social media account for that matter). Does THAT sound like you? Well, here is what you get from a brand new twitter account:

• An opportunity to rebrand any way you like. Choose an account with a handle you actually want to be known by.
• You no longer need to mass follow anyone, you know exactly where that leads. Only follow people you you’re actually interested in following. You can’t make a connection with someone you don’t care about.
• Talking about connections, you finally have the opportunity to make some genuine ones, because you only follow people you actually want to connect with and there is few enough of them that you have the time.
• You can tweet what you feel like and what you think is worth tweeting as you no longer need to ‘satisfy’ your ‘fans’. If you tweet great content – fine. If you tweet inane bon mots – also fine. Oh and only retweet content you actually like, you even have time to read it now.
• You can follow your twitter stream on the web! Throw away your twitter client (if you want).
• You can filter your account mercilessly. No more bots or ‘money experts’ following you, give the Twitter ‘block’ feature a real workout.
• Spend 15 minutes in total on twitter per day and still get more value from it than you used to.

At the end of the day what you really want is for people to follow you because they care about what you have to say, not because they expect a follow-back. Sure you won’t get a massive account with 1000s of followers (who knows though, you just might, you may be that interesting). What you will get is an account which is almost a community, an account where you can engage 90% of your followers when you tweet as opposed to 1%. That’s powerful, considering that to engage 90 people you would need to have 100 people following you, whereas with your old account you would have needed to have 9000. I’ll leave it to you to decide which you would rather have.

In the meantime I am enjoying my brand new twitter experience. Feels a little like a breath of fresh air, refreshing, fun and liberating. Send me a tweet if you like and I’ll reply, because I care about what you have to say, and I can keep track of my whole stream, from the web, with no trouble and minimal time investment. Can you?

[image credit: tomsaint]

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Why You Should Start Over On Twitter With A BRAND NEW Account

I’m still amazed by the people that think Twitter is nothing more than a fad that is soon to disappear. That’s what they said about MySpace, then Facebook too. Obviously, nothing lasts forever, but by the looks of it Twitter isn’t going anywhere in the near future.

Just take a look at who is using Twitter these days:

• Movie Stars
• Musicians
• Radio and TV Personalities
• Authors
• Marketers
• Athletes
• Etc

The list goes on and on. People are getting on Twitter at an amazing rate and although many don’t use it much, those that do spend more time on Twitter than on any other social network. Twitter integrates easily with blogs and website, but it is also easy to use via a variety of clients. I can Tweet from my iPhone, upload pictures on the go with Twitpic, and even send Tweets straight to my MySpace and Facebook accounts in seconds.

Twitter is fresh, but it’s also relevant. News spreads virally on Twitter faster than it can hit CNN. Professionals use it to spread the word about their latest products and services, while businesses use it to keep consumers up to date. The local 5 O’clock news uses it to get feedback on coverage, and small businesses use it to offer special discounts and coupons.

There is no limit to what Twitter can be used for, but it isn’t for a lack of trying. Every day programmers and designers are creating new applications to test Twitter uses and its limits. Every day there is a new way to use it. I’m in the business of staying up to date with Twitter and even I can’t keep up. It is growing at an exponential pace.

Business are making a living by offering Twitter services, clients, and software suites. Sure, it might be a little risky to stake the future of your business on an online service that isn’t profitable yet, but if I were a betting man I’d say that Twitter is the perfect vehicle to ride to internet stardom. Twitter’s rise is so huge, I liken it to a mini dot-com opportunity that you can ride into more profitable ventures. Twitter’s climate is the perfect breeding ground for startups, tech junkies, and software developers.

Yeah, I expect something to replace Twitter down the road, but I give it at least 2-3 years of solid growth before it levels off. That’s plenty of time for you to jump on the bandwagon and make something happen. Even if Twitter only lasts a year, you’ve got plenty of time to make some waves and build a following. Twitter connects people better than any other service can…people want that. 3 years ago I couldn’t imagine using something like Twitter to talk to the world, now I can’t imagine a world without it. Twitter is now the default agent for spreading news and information and it is a preferred way to connect with people all across the globe. You can try to convince yourself that Twitter won’t be around long, but soon you’ll have to find an excuse for why you were wrong. What’s the point in trying to fight the future of communication?

Remember that guy that you make fun of for talking about walking to school for 10 miles in the snow without shoes? That’s what the guy that thinks Twitter is already dead sounds like. Don’t knock it until you try it, that’s my recommendation.

[image credit: Matt Hamm]

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Why Twitter Isn’t Going Anywhere

Twicli is another service for posting photos to Twitter, yet it stands out from the rest with a set of very useful features.

Twicli is provided by Picli, a photo sharing site based on users’ votes, or “Photo-Digg” if you wish. Picli has adapted itself to the Twitter era with Twicli. They harness the features of a photo sharing site in a nice way.

How do I use it?

In order to start using Twicli, you first need to authorize it with Twitter. If you’re already signed into Twitter, then you only need to allow Twicli to access your Twitter account. Otherwise, you’ll need to sign in.

Afterwards, Twicli offers to synchronize your background image to the background image on Twitter. If branding is important to you, this is a feature you’ll appreciate.

Now that we’re in, we can start uploading photos. Twicli offers uploading of photos via the web and posting them on Twitter. You can also upload a set of photos. This way, the photos will be bundled in one URL that can be posted to Twitter. By using the set feature, you avoid flooding your Twitter timeline with too many tweets.

The more interesting option is uploading pictures via your mobile phone. Twicli allocates a special email address for this use. After taking a picture on your mobile phone, you simply send it via email. The picture is uploaded and gets a short URL. The picture’s URL is posted to Twitter together with the subject line of the letter.

Users of Twitpic or other Photo-Twitter services may ask themselves: what’s new here? Well, here come the advantages.

Twicli advantages

Apart from the option to upload a set of photos, Twicli allows publishing the photos in different sizes. This is a benefit taken from Picli, and very familiar to users of Flickr. The different photo sizes make it easy to find the right image for to embedding in a blog.

Another cool feature is the tags: Picli extracts the words from the subject line and turns most of them into tags. Using tags, we can easily find similar pictures. This is also used in the homepage – popular tags are highlighted there.

Maybe the best feature of Twicli are the comments: other Twitter users can comment on the photos, and the comments are posted back to Twitter. This tight integration empowers Twicli. This way, you can get to know other peole through the photos.

Twicli photo page – click to enlarge

Twicli also has an option to upload videos, but I haven’t tested it.

Twicli shortcomings

Twicli has a few minor usability issues. The file name of the photo is used for the title in the image page and also as a tag. The vast majority of people who take pictures with mobile phones don’t change the default file name. In my case, it’s just a long meaningless number.

Twicli offers a short URL as well as a permanent URL. I find it unnecessary, and even confusing.

The last shortcoming is the lackof an editing option. I would like to have the option to edit the title and the tags of my photos.

Twicli is still in beta, so I find these shortcomings minor in comparison to the advantages.

Out of all the photo services for Twitter, I find Twicli to be the best. Enjoy!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Review: Twicli – Twitter Photos Improved

• Pair your Twitter account with your favorite IM client (Yahoo, Windows/MSN, or Google Talk) with Twip.me (requires username and password for Twitter’s API). Uses simple calls to send your tweets to “twipme” and have them post to your Twitter status, @replies, or direct messages.
• Chirbit aims to take “microblogging” to the next level with “micro-podcasting” where you can record short blips of audio, much like you would a 140-character tweet.
• Tweetcloud’s goal is to quickly show users “what’s being said” across the Twittersphere or from a specific Twitter user through an intuitive interface (a cloud). Useful for searching #hashtags or by username and topic.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Sunday Roundup: Twitter IM, Micro-Podcasting, and TweetClouds

Virgil Vo writes:

I’ve just recently created a new Twitter Application called Listento.fm. You can share both music and video files on Twitter. All you have to do is cut and paste a direct MP3 link or a YouTube/IMEEM link, as well as supplying the name of the artists and the title of the song. Upon doing so, a media page will be created and you can then share it with your followers.

Listento.fm has been featured in these publications:
http://www.killerstartups.com/Video-Music-Photo/listento-fm-share-music-video-on-twitter
http://www.feedmyapp.com/p/a/listento-fm-share-music-video-on-twitter/9212
http://go2web20.net/app/?a=Listento.fm

Nitin from TrialX sent us this:

We have just launched a twitter app to increase information availability of clinical trials. The app is simple, and after our initial testing, looks useful. All you need is to QuTweet (query tweets pronounced cute-tweets) us at TrialX (@trialx), put in the keyword “CT” (for Clinical Trial) followed by your health profile. In about a minute we’ll send you a reply tweet with a tinyurl link to the TrialX page containing matching trials as per your QuTweet. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=trialx

Mark Kolb of Outwit.me sent us these fun games:

I’d like to introduce you to using twitter for entertainment over at www.outwit.me. The site is the nexus of Twitter and games, using tweets to communicate activity and hints.

First, I have developed a collection of tweetable word games. Clues are tweeted to followers to find mystery words and phrases.
@Tweet_Quiz
@Tweet_Words
@TWord_Chains
@GuessWord

Also we have real-time tweeted confessions via @ConfessToMe.

Finally there are never-ending stories and poems, one line at a time via @StoryTellerMe.

Feel free to check these out and let us (and their respective creators/developers) what you think in our comments!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Sunday Roundup – Music, Games, and Clinical Trials

The great thing about Twitter is that it has the potential to solve real time problems extremely quickly. With a host of people available online at a particular moment, you can use it to get help on a multitude of levels.

This real time capability has helped establish Twitter as a ‘help engine’ and the twittersphere is awash with stories of how Twitter has helped its users. Guy Kawasaki has had a laptop cable hand delivered by a fellow Twitter user – Matt Perez has used it to test different versions of a website on various mobile devices. It has even had more humanitarian benefits helping to prevent death threats at a school. It has even proven it’s worth through live tweeting at conferences, when a speaker became ill, and people rushed to help.

Many of us are now turning to Twitter as the first place to get an answer or help on a potential problem, its alot quicker than waiting for a reply on a message board. So, if you decide that the Twittersphere is the place you want to ask questions and get help, what are the services and sites you should be following on Twitter?

Mahalo Answers

Twitter: answers

Jason Calacanis, and the team of Mahalo have jumped in quickly on the real time potential of Twitter and registered the ‘answers’ Twitter account, something you would have expected Yahoo Answers to do. Essentially what they are doing is providing an additional interface to the Mahalo site, via Twitter, then letting you know when someone answers the question. Maybe not just as realtime as some of the other services listed here, but useful nonetheless.

CSS Help

Twitter: thatcssguy

Justin Rockwell has found a niche. He now makes about $350 a week scouring Twitter for people tweeting about their problems building Web pages. Using the Twitter ID ThatCSSGuy , he offers to help solve their problems and asks for a tip in return, building both brand exposure for himself and offering a useful service. Follow him if you are in any way involved with web development, and in need of CSS or HTML answers

Twittez

Web: twittez.com

Twittez is a very simple web application that crowd sources for you by looking for the text “does anyone know?” within your tweets. In my opinion this is a very clever way to introduce new users to their service, and gain traction by integrating seamlessly with the Twittersphere.

Twecipe

Twitter: twecipe

Twecipe is the Twitter counterpart of lookandtaste.com . It’s great in that it actually allows Twitter users to tweet at it, and receive recipes back. Genius. If you have a few random bits and pieces around your kitchen and need to cook up a simple recipe, Twecipe is the bot to follow. Well actually, describing Twecipe as a bot is a bit inaccurate. That particular tweet gave me a chuckle a while back.

LazyTweet

Twitter: lazytweet

LazyTweet works right from within Twitter. Just #hashtag your question with the term #lazytweet, and it picks up on it, and resyndicates both via its website and via the Twitter account LazyTweet. Followers of LazyTweet can then visit the website, and either offer an answer via Twitter, or via the comment box on their site.

Twtpoll

Twitter: twtpoll

Another genius little application that allows users to perform market research – at little or no cost. Major brands like EMI are using it to work out how their marketing spend is working out. Now that’s clever Web2.0 marketing. Create your poll on the site, and post on Twitter for your following to vote on. New polls appear syndicated on the website at twtpoll.com – which gives you particular poll question that extra bit of exposure.

ToAnswer

Twitter: toask

Twitter: toanswer

Similar to how Mahalo works, toAnswer posts your questions for other users to answer, then alerts you when an answer is forthcoming. They have two twitter accounts setup, one for the answers, and one for questions. To Ask a question follow toask – and post an @ message to it. To answer someone else’s question simply follow toanswer then post the [questionId]. Both questions and answers are syndicated on the toAnswer website.

WhoisHosting

Twitter: whoishosting

WhoisHosting have come up with a brilliant way of boosting their public profile via Twitter. Basically their twitter bot allows you to find out which webhost is hosting a website. Want to know where Twitip.com is hosted? No problem. Simply send a direct message to the Twitterbot, which will reply with the details.

TwAnswers

Twitter: @askthat

Put together by a lone developer, @le_punk – twAnswers allows posting of a question both through the website at twAnswers, and via the twitter account askthat. It works in much the same way as toanswer, however it features the latest contributors in a sidebar, providing further exposure of it’s users, and thus giving back to the community.

Commuter feed

Twitter: commuter

There’s nothing worse than being stuck in traffic. Well, thanks to Twitter, commuters in the US can now at least pre-emt builds up of traffic, and alerts you to it, before you hit the road. You can now warn fellow road users of builds up of traffic just by tweeting @commuterfeed – with the details of your traffic knightmare. The service isn’t perfect, as it can’t currently geo-tag you, however they have worked on proposing an open standard for traffic alerts, which could help to see something like this take off worldwide.

As Twitter grows in size, these services will only get more and more useful. Websites such as Yahoo Answers, and Microsoft’s recent offering QnA are at real risk from some of the service listed above, as more and more people turn to near real-time answers to give them the help they need. Any of you guys got any other twitter bots or websites that you use to get real-time help? Let me know in the comments.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Twitter: The Real-Time Answer Engine

• 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.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



What Twitter Tools and Services Do You Use?