My Essential Twitter Tools

Find me at jowyang on Twitter

Many conversations are shifting to Twitter, this post proves it (network with others, by adding those in the comments). Twitter is extensible, and many third-party developers are creating tools around the simple data being exported for a variety of unique applications.

If you’re using Twitter for personal, corporate use, or to manage the brand of a client, you’ll need the right tools to find and engage the discussions.

Here are the tools that I’m using to improve my Twitter experience, note that all of these are using my profile, but you can change to fit your needs.

1) Client: Although I mainly use the browser to see what’s going on (I click on profiles to see what people have said) Twhirl is the most popular client, using adobe air technology. Leave this on your desktop, instead of going to browser, also these clients may be more accurate in seeing who’s replying to you, unlike the browser version.

2) Search: Use Tweetscan (Update: I now use Summize as it can track conversations) to see who’s talking about you, your brand, or a topic you’re interested in. For example, I may not just search on “jowyang” but also on “owyang” as some don’t use the full name.

3) Conversations: Quotably is the top ‘conversation’ tracker, it threads together the discussions that members are having by looking at the replies, interesting to see how conversations spiral into different threads.

4) Aggregation: Friendfeed puts all of our RSS content onto one page, making it easy to see from one glance (rather than going to different properties) and you can even reply from friendfeed to different tools. It’s smarter to organize around people, rather than tools.

5) Tagging Content: For advanced users, you can start to use the hashag “#” to add metadata around any tweet, this becomes more important as we rate and tag content. Here’s a helpful primer. I’m not making much use of this feature –yet.

6) Location Based: If you live in a particular area, and want to parse out a specific location, this Twitterlocal filter finds tweets based upon a users profile location. If you’ve a local business, this could become useful.

7) Alerts: (update) Often, people will blog about the conversations that happen in twitter, the conversation shifts back to blogs. As a result, I setup Google Alerts for the phrase @jowyang, I see it appear 3-5 times a week on blogs. Thanks Andrew for the reminder in the comments.

I should add that I check to see who is replying to me from my mobile phone, and sometimes update from mobile phone.

Out of the 6, now 7 tools I listed above, which ones do you use, or are there others you recommend?

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 10:31 am and is filed under MicroMedia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.