15 Tools for Your Twitter Toolbox

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

There are hundreds of Twitter applications on the market, many of which have been covered previously on this blog, including a number of clients, such as TweetDeck and Posty. With the Twitter ecosystem continuing to grow, as evidenced by last night's post on SocialToo, I wanted to touch upon a few that I use, and that I feel are unique and useful. This post highlights fifteen different Twitter tools that I believe would be excellent additions for your Twitter toolbox.

1) Twuffer



Twuffer is a simple, useful utility that allows you to schedule pre-written messages for posting at a later date in time. You could use this tool for setting up reminders for upcoming birthdays, meetings, appointments, paying bills and so forth.

2) Twistory


Twistory brings Twitter and Google Calender together for a marriage made in heaven. Simply add your Twitter backlog feed into any of your favorite calendar applications, and you have a perfect date/time synced Twitter diary. This is a great tool for efficiently creating one central, what I call, visual productivity hub for your Twitter data. This application makes Twitter an ideal application for a digital Rolodex.


3) Tweetake


Tweetake only has one purpose, and that is to provide you with a backup of all your Twitter data. Data is backed up via a .CSV file. It's good to periodically download a local copy of all your Twitter followers, tweets etc. If Twitter ever suffers a catastrophic technical failure, it can not recover from, you will be isolated from any data loss.


4) TweetStats


TweetStats is nice metrics tool that gives you graphed visual statistics for data, such as posting interface used, tweets per day, tweets per hour, tweet timelines and reply statistics. You can also see the latest trends being talked about on Twitter.


5) TwitterCounter


Twitter Counter gives you a graphed snapshot of your daily follower counts. You can track daily growth or lack of it, and it will also give you an estimated follower count for the oncoming month, based on it's data. The other notable feature they provide is a Twitter follower count chicklet. It's identical looking to the Feedburner counter chicklet, whereas this one displays your Twitter follower count.

6) TweetCloud


Everyone loves a good word cloud. Tweetclouds allows you to create a word cloud from a public Twitter users stream, or from any words of text you freely input.


7) TwitterLocal


This is a great tool for finding and filtering out public tweets within a certain geographical area. You can search for activity by city, state, or postal code. An RSS or XML Feed is generated for your search results. Add the RSS feed into Google Reader, and track local activity there. They also offer an Adobe Air App, so you can track tweets from your desktop.


8) Tweetburner


Tweetburner is a URL shortening service. It allows you to create short URLs, share them with your friends over Twitter, and view click statistics for your shortened URLs.


9) TwitStamp


TwitStamp allows you to create badges to display your most recent Twitter statuses on your blog or website. You can also create "twitcard"badges, as pictured below. These are clean and simple, and should compliment any website or sidebar nicely.


10) Qwitter


Qwitter is a helpful and creative way for using Twitter, basically as a support journal and tool for smokers looking to kick the habit. Each time you smoke, send Qwitter the number of cigarettes you just smoked by posting an update to Twitter. Every day, Qwitter adds together all the updates you sent that day and adds them to your progress graph. Qwitter can also connect you with other Twitter users who have or are going through the same experiences as you.

11) Twinfluence

Measure the combined influence of you and your followers. This could be a great boost to your ego. How influential is your Twitter social net?

12) Less Friends


Do all the people you follow on Twitter follow you back? This tool will help you find out. It may be time to do some pruning.

13) Twitturls

Twitturls shows you the most popular links being talked about on Twitter, in real time. Content is pulled from public Twitter streams, ranked and listed on the site. You can see what the current buzz is all about.

14) iTweet


iTweet is an alternative Twitter interface for use with both your web browser and your iPhone. The web based interface has a clean user interface, and comes loaded with pretty much everything you need. It has built-in auto-refresh, search and hashtags, full follow, block, notifications user profile features and more.

15) Twidroid


Twidroid, I thought deserved a worthy mention, because it's the first full-featured Twitter client available for Android mobile phones. It was released only a few weeks ago, and is currently available for download in the Android market.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

Posty MicroUpdate App Adds Support for DMs, Favorites, Retweets

For the last few months, I've been using Posty to deliver updates to Twitter and Identi.ca simultaneously. While TweetDeck thus far has a more robust interface and more options, the fact I can update multiple networks at the same time has been keeping me using Posty. Today, Cesare Rocchi posted version 1.6 of the application, which adds some critical functions that had me going back to the Twitter Web site - namely direct messages, and for some, retweeting.

Posty supports the ability to microblog to Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, FriendFeed and Identi.a simultaneously, much like Ping.fm. In the Adobe AIR app, you write your message on the right, select the networks you want to hit, and Posty submits them in parallel.

While I tend to use Posty simply for submitting, you can also catch up on your friends' timeline or the public timeline of each service, giving you a small window into the world of what's going on at Twitter, FriendFeed and the rest.

As Cesare lays out in a blog post today, the newest version adds support for direct messages for both Twitter and Identi.ca, support for favorites in both Twitter and Identi.ca, support for retweeting, and integrated URL shortening, using the http://is.gd engine.


I can DM directly from Posty now.
The application is still small in stature, and lacks some of the UI customizations seen in TweetDeck for example, but when it comes to usability, Posty just does its job well, and I'll keep using it, at least until TweetDeck integrates Identi.ca or FriendFeed, which would make things a lot more interesting.

You can download Posty here.

TweetDeck Update Offers UI Customization, New Features

In July, TweetDeck debuted as a new Adobe AIR app aiming to simplify your Twitter experience - offering live Twitter streams, grouping, and integrated search, all in one window. In the ensuing three months, TweetDeck has grown to incorporate services like 12seconds.tv, and has become a must-use application for many of the digerati, including Guy Kawasaki, who swore by it during his keynote at the recent BlogWorld Expo.

Today, Iain Dodsworth rolled out an update to the service with some much-requested features, including the ability to alter the application's look and feel, an improved user interface, support for new URL shorteniing services, part of the never-ending battle to be verbose within 140 characters or less, and additional security, as calls to Twitter are now made using HTTPS.


TweetDeck Shows Tweets, Groups, Replies, Search and DMs in One Window
The new update allows you pretty much all the functionality you get from Twitter's Web site from within TweetDeck, including marking and unmarking individual tweets as favorites, and adding the ability to follow or unfollow other users. Combined with TweetDeck's integrated search capability, the pair would set you up to follow a group of users who are focused on topics you're interested in.


You can see Tweets and Replies flow by in their own columns
And should you want to avoid being overloaded by seeing all the tweets from your friends scrolling by, you can even "turn off twitter updates", letting you use the tool as a desktop Twitter search application or a TwitScoop client. (See the full release notes here)

So far, I've trended toward using Posty, as it puts my updates on both Twitter and Identica, but when it comes to strictly Twitter, TweetDeck's UI and feature set puts the others to shame. You can get TweetDeck yourself at http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/.

Identi.ca Launches SMS Support, Sort Of.

Guest Post By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

It seems, amongst all the identi.ca, Twhirl and Posty hoopla, today we seemed to have missed one important feature -- that identi.ca, at some point recently, launched SMS notifications via their settings interface.

Currently, if you log into identi.ca, then click on settings in the header, you'll notice a new tab in your settings called "SMS". If you click on the SMS tab it allows you to set up your cell phone among various carriers and notifications will be sent to you if you opt to do so.


The service doesn't seem to have full SMS support yet though, as they are apparently utilizing SMS via e-mail which according to my own sources in the industry, isn't the most reliable method of sending SMS. I tried it out, and while it seemed to work well by sending all my friends' updates to my cell phone (there is no ability yet that I'm aware to turn off notifications for individuals via SMS, which is a major problem), the messages I received were unorganized and hard to read.

Each one was also sent from a different number, making it hard to keep all the messages in one place. It also seems that you can't post messages back to identi.ca from your cell phone, another must have if it is going to be a true competitor with Twitter or Jaiku. You can see how bad it got after 10 messages or so on my iPhone.

Having SMS available as an option on identi.ca is a nice, and very welcome, addition. This shows they are truly in the game and have strong potential to be a mobile status and communication tool like Twitter. For me, I like to use SMS with Twitter to filter out the posts of the thousand or so I follow into a small segment I can pay attention to. SMS also enables me to easily message others via one interface, and post statuses from wherever I am located. Knowing this is on its way with identi.ca, along with Monday's launch of both Twhirl and Posty integration, makes them a strong consideration for me to begin using much more often now. However, I still think they have a long way to go before they fully match Twitter's feature-set and can compete head-on.

I'm excited to see where this all ends up. You can find me actively using identi.ca at http://identi.ca/jessestay. Louis can similarly be found at http://identi.ca/louisgray.

Posty's Single-Window Microblogging AIR App Adds Identi.ca Support

Adobe's AIR platform is seeing a rise in applications designed to bring Web activity to your desktop. From TweetDeck to Twhirl, Alert Thingy to Feedalizer, a host of new apps have debuted in the last few months, offering the ability to view or post to one or more services including Twitter, FriendFeed, Seesmic, Pownce, Jaiku and lately, Plurk or Identi.ca.

But not every AIR app gets all services, and those that support more than one service usually require more than one window to get the job done. A newer entrant to this space, Posty, authored by Cesare Rocchi, offers support, as of today, for six different Web update services, all in a single window, allowing those with accounts in multiple places to send simultaneous updates to more than one location.

Posty, from a single black square window, lets you post updates to six different services, including Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, Friendfeed, and as of this morning, Identi.ca. And if you have logins at more than one of them, you can simply use the checkboxes to make sure your updates go to multiple destinations at once.

While the application is rather spartan in its ability to be configured, it simply gets the job done. At the top is a horizontal bar featuring each of the six individual services, a posting window, and a settings window, where you can add your login information.

Key to making the application useful is that for each service, be it Twitter, Identi.ca or FriendFeed, for example, you can view your own entries, entries from your friends, the public feed, see replies, or you can use integrated search.

As with other AIR apps, you can take appropriate actions per service. For FriendFeed, you can like or make comments. On Identi.ca, you can reply or go directly to the update. And on Twitter, you can reply, mark as a favorite, or open the note in your Web browser. This wasn't always available, as in the very first release of Posty earlier this month, you couldn't see your friends' updates, only your own and public timelines. After I traded e-mail with Cesare a couple weeks ago, he was quick to respond with a new version incorporating the update.

Unlike more well-known AIR applications, like Twhirl (which Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb called a "killer app" today) Posty handles all these services in a single window, utilizing the icons. Instead of monopolizing screen space with multiple parallel windows, Posty takes an all in one strategy.

When I first reviewed TweetDeck, some people said they were "tired of black" when it came to AIR applications, so if you're not a big fan of black, Posty isn't really for you, as that's how it looks, period. There are options to change the text color from "Sunny" to "Snowy", "Icy" and in between, but it doesn't actually change the app.

Cosmetics aside, Posty has given us a strong single-window application to both consume and send updates to multiple microblogging services at once. Identi.ca is rising now, and gaining momentum thanks to Twitter's occasional issues, and its open source roots. With services like Posty making it an equal player early on, the new kid on the block gets another boost.

To download Posty for yourself, find it here: http://tinyurl.com/getposty.