Just like in real life, your online social life will expand to fit any amount of time you give it. Twitter is the most notorious for this “productivity drain” – that’s why talented programmers have taken it upon themselves to create new ways to make managing your online social life even easier. Here are seven of the most popular software applications you can use to effortlessly keep up with Twitter (and other popular networks) even when you can’t be constantly connected.
Hey folks, another Sunday Roundup from a few suggestions made through the contact form for Twitter related sites and tools to check out. You may or may not be familiar with these, but each week I’m trying to feature three of the dozens that come in. – Lara
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.
I like to compare Twitter to a new relationship. At first, you are interested, but your guard is up. However, as time goes by, you find yourself spending more and more time together until the relationship blossoms and takes on a life of its own. Twitter has a great way of pulling you in like this in a way that no other social network can. Everyone seems warm and friendly and you quickly find that you can take your guard down and start talking with people from all over the world as if they were a guest in your home.
I love Twitter for this reason because it seems that it has never been easier to build so many relationships so quickly. This is really something most of us, unless we are celebrities, have never had to face before. That is, having to deal with thousands of friends at once. At first, a few hundred friends are easy to manage, but soon you have a list of thousands that you have to sort through. It can become a daunting task trying to keep up with everyone, much less interact with them. This is why I don’t think I’d be able to use Twitter without TweetDeck and why I think that the following advice just might save the Twitter interaction that you’ve come to love.
What we are going to do is turn a normal Twitter feed into something that is easy to use and makes interacting with people much easier. If you don’t have TweetDeck, then I highly recommend that you go and grab it now before you finish reading this post. Although Twhirl does come in handy for certain tasks, in my opinion, nothing works as seamlessly with Twitter as TweetDeck does. (more…)
by Alexander Moya Barquero of Tecnovits (Spanish). Follow him @twivits.
Image by respres
Twitter tools have emerged all over the web, as this great service offers many ways to get in touch with people that really matter to you. However, safety is another of those things that matter and not all Twitter tools are trustworthy.
But don’t be alarmed, not all the tools out there are after your twitter identity! Let’s have a look at 11 twitter tools that don’t require your password and are still very useful and powerful:
Statistics:
TweetStats: Statistics for your Twitter account, this tool graphs the amount of hourly and monthly tweets of your account, the amount of replies and the interface that you use the most.
TwitterFriends: One of the most complete Twitter statistic tools, with just your twitter username you can find out very impressive statistics, but don’t just take my word for it, Darren wrote a more complete review of this tool: TwitterFriends – A Useful Twitter Metrics Tool (more…)
Hey folks, just wanted to make mention of a few suggestions some of you have made through the contact form for Twitter related sites and tools to check out. Many of these I’m sure you probably haven’t heard of yet. We get SO many of these, that I’ll likely be posting some every week. – Lara
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.
The growing popularity of Twitter and the extensive use of it becomes very time consuming. Topify, a simple but powerful tool, saves a lot of time and energy when replying to direct messages and responding to new followers. Topify also has an added value in detecting spam followers. Let’s look into it.
Topify was created a few months ago by Arik Fraimovich & Ouriel Ohayon, two Israeli web entrepreneurs. The basic idea of their service is to simplify email notifications on Twitter. I’ve been using Topify lately, and found it’s a superb time saver. (more…)
Nisha Chittal is a student who blogs about politics, social issues, twenty-something life, and technology at Politicoholic. Follow her @nishachittal
(Editor’s Note: This post was submitted prior to the changes at Twitter.com in regards to @replies versus @yourusername and how it handles that. Please take that into consideration when reading!)
When I was new to twitter, I had no idea what I was doing — as is the case for most people when they first sign up. After I started following a few people I noticed all the different applications their Tweets were coming from: Twhirl, TweetDeck, Twittelator, Twitterific, PowerTwitter, TwitterFon, the list goes on. How do you sort through all of them and find the right application to use? Is any one of them better than the others? After trying nearly everything, I have a few ideas as to how to find the right Twitter app to suit your needs. (more…)
One of the most common questions that I’m asked by fellow Twitter users is how I manage the large number of people that I follow and am followed by on Twitter.
I always struggle to answer that question because to be quite honest there are days that I don’t think I do particularly well with the task and where it can all seem a little overwhelming.
However…. one of the tools that has helped me incredibly to manage the task is TweetDeck. TweetDeck has a lot of great tools designed to help Twitter users with a variety of tasks – some of which are simply indispensable to those trying to connect with large numbers of people.
Yesterday I stumbled upon a great video by Jesse Newhart which shows a few of the features of TweetDeck that he uses to stay engaging with over 15,000 followers. In the video Jesse talks about his API settings and how he uses Filtering to find people to engage with and interesting information.
To be honest I’ve not previously used the filtering feature very much (I do outline one way that is different to Jesse below) – however now that I see how Jesse uses it I think it could become quite useful.
Here’s the video. Below it I share 3 more techniques that I use with TweetDeck.
If you loved our 10 Twitter Tips that Help You Work Smarter, you’ll find our newest list of even more “must have” Twitter services and plugins even better! Special thanks to fellow TwiTip readers whose suggestions were invaluable in helping us create the latest list. It was difficult to narrow it down to just ten, but here they are!
1. HootSuite – Streamlined Twitter account management from one clean, user-friendly interface is yours when you use HootSuite. In addition to being able to manage multiple Twitter accounts and profile from one application, you can also schedule tweets, track clicks to your links (using HootSuite’s ow.ly URL shortening service) and get an entire overview of each Twitter account with easy tab-based navigation.
2. TweetChannel – Confused by #hashtags in Twitter? You shouldn’t be after reading this tutorial but if you’d like an easier way to send your tweets to a specific audience, you’ll want to check out Tweet Channel, a simplified, user-friendly interface to working with hashtags. See the most popular channels as well as the newest created channels directly from the Tweet Channel website.
3. Tweet2Tweet – What ARE they talking about? With Tweet2Tweet, you can see the @replies between any two people in just minutes. Keep up on any conversation instantly. Just enter both screen names on Tweet2Tweet to see the results in reverse chronological order (most recent entries first).
4. TwitterSnooze – TwitterSnooze provides a very valuable (and free) service. If you follow someone who’s rather…”talkative” you can temporarily “snooze” them and their tweets without unfollowing them permanently. Choose a timeframe anywhere from a day to a month. Perfect for your more “verbose” tweeters.
5. TweetCube – Want to share audio, video or images on Twitter? TweetCube is a free file sharing service that lets you tweet larger files to your followers. Just a couple of clicks is all it takes to start sharing files through your TweetCube account.
6. Twitterless – Thanks to a vigilant TwiTip user, we learned that a previous resource in our Top 10, Qwitter, is no longer sending out unfollow notices (even though their site is still up as of this article writing). Fortunately, Twitterless offers the same unfollowed notification service at Qwitter – just follow @tless to sign up.
7. CoTweet – CoTweet lets multiple people at the same company manage their business Twitter accounts together while keeping tabs on their brand name and how it’s being used. CoTweet can also be used to assign tasks to different departments and follow up on results and feedback.
8. OutTwit – Microsoft Outlook is an indispensible part of the day for many individuals, businesses and organizations. OutTwit’s feature list is too numerous to list here, but suffice it to say that if you use Outlook, you can manage and post to your Twitter account directly from your Outlook interface. You can also track keywords and have the details sent to your email, even if you’re not following the original tweeter.
9. TweeTake – TweeTake lets you backup your entire Twitter account into a .CSV file (commonly opened with Microsoft Excel). Back up your tweets, followers and people you’re following in just a few minutes. Since many people have lost followers in the past due to Twitter downtime, or you may want to refer to an older Tweet (Twitter doesn’t currently let you keep older tweets), TweeTake is a must-have tool for keeping a copy of your Twitter account should the inevitable happen!
10. Twitt(url)y – Twitt(url)y lets you instantly see what people are tweeting about and linking to. Track the hot trends instantly. A great source for possible blog entries and new followers since you can see who tweeted or re-tweeted the link as well as the URLs they used. You can also see how often the link was tweeted in a certain timeframe.
Just for Fun
There are a couple of Twitter tools I uncovered that are just plain fun to check out!
TweetWheel – See which of your Twitter friends know each other! If you have a large follower base, this may take time to load and only does the last 100 followers, but it’s interesting to see who’s following who and just how short the “degrees of separation” are between your followers.
TweetValue – How much is your Twitter account worth? As a sample, Barack Obama’s account is worth over $40,000 and Darren’s is worth $3,372.
TwitterGrader – How do you rank on Twitter? Check out your Twitter “grade” out of 100.
Try any or all of these Twitter services and applications and open up a whole new world of possibilities using everybody’s favorite 140-character website. Enjoy and let me know of any must-have Twitter tools I missed in your comments below!
I like to compare Twitter to a new relationship. At first, you are interested, but your guard is up. However, as time goes by, you find yourself spending more and more time together until the relationship blossoms and takes on a life of its own. Twitter has a great way of pulling you in like this in a way that no other social network can. Everyone seems warm and friendly and you quickly find that you can take your guard down and start talking with people from all over the world as if they were a guest in your home.
