cream of the twitter tool crop

I'm going to suggest you sign up for twitter regardless of your understanding of it. Import your address book, search for your favorite celebs: @elimanning, @Michael_Phelps, @LukeWilson, @algore, @MCHammer, @THE_REAL_SHAQ, @lancearmstrong, @snoopdogg, etc.. build from there.

If you don't know how to use twitter, google 'how do i use twitter' to have your wildest dreams come alive.

After a few weeks I had close to 200 followers, now at week 4 I have 800. I'd like to say my following is growing exponentially, or at some growing rate, but we'll see in weeks. I'm not going to keep count of who follows me and when, that's what twittercounter is for. twittercounter keeps track of your follow history and graphs them on a nice interactive chart.

They also provide statistics And a badge


Next up is Mr. Tweet. All you need to do is follow @MrTweet and he will contact you once he's collected enough information about your extended network. Mr. Tweet will serve you recommended people to follow, based on interests and popularity. Mr. Tweet also keeps stats on you to show other people using the service. Every other week I get this direct message:

Hi! Your suggestions and profile stats were just refreshed (done biweekly) Have fun! http://mrtweet.net/home/harrisonpowers

To quickly check who you are following that isn't following you back, and vice versa, check out friendorfollow. Just enter your twitter name and get a nice picture collage of everyone you're (dis)connected to.

For statistics on your tweeting with regards to how influential you are, we pull out the Twitter Influence Calculator. This service lets you know how often you are being referenced and retweeted, as well as indicating your signal-to-noise ratio.

Now for the last of the web apps, but probably the most important. socialtoo is a great asset to your twitter account. socialtoo sends you an email every morning with a list of everyone that followed you and everyone that stopped following you. You can also set up socialtoo to automatically reciprocate follows, and it can send an automatic Direct Message to your new followers. This feature I feel is annoying, and thankfully you can turn it off receiving them in your socialtoo settings.

Now I would like to move on to the desktop apps for twitter. The first being the most popular and robust. I would also like to point out that a major revision of it is being released tomorrow, Marshall Kirkpatrick from Read/WriteWeb lays out the new features of TweetDeck:

Language translation, Stocktwits, Hashtag Support, User Search, One Column View [...] easier group management to email forwarding of tweets to some API access improvements.

The app is popular because of it's interface, which is split into customizable columns.
I use (All Tweets)|(Replies)|(Group:Friends)|(Search: opensource)|etc.. you can tailor it to your needs.

Another great twitter client is DestroyTwitter, my current favorite, which has a tabbed interface. And great colors. It also rarely goes over my Twitter API limit unlike TweetDeck.

Both apps are built on the Adobe AIR development platform. The apps work very well, but they crash occasionally. It's not a serious problem though, as all the information is stored remotely.

If you've made it this far, you're interested in twitter. And you might have noticed a lack of screencast in this post, for which I apologize. Please take these tips with you:

• Follow people that get linked in your twitterstream. This is the classic way of expanding your network.
• Link, link, link - Personal information is interesting at times, but unless wrapped in some well thought-out humor gets pretty dry. Share links to things you find interesting, and make sure to shorten them with a service like is.gd (built into the twitter apps mentioned)
• Track those links - If you are curious how many people are clicking your links you can use a url-shortener with extended capabilities like adjix.
• Retweet your favorite tweets.

Oh yeah, and follow me. I'll be sure to follow you.