Twitter tools abound January 11, 2009
Posted by Kristin Lynch in : technology , 3 comments
I’m generally not a big fan of tag clouds, but I like Wordle. You can build tag clouds of any site or blog as long as you have the URL. You can also configure and style the cloud in a variety of ways – color schemes, filters, horizontal or vertical display, etc. Wordle actually makes tag clouds interesting.
Here is a recent tag cloud of my Twitter feed.
I’ve also been using WhoShouldIFollow.com to find new tweople to follow. The site helps you find new tweople based on the tweople you already follow.
Each listing provides that user’s basic bio details, plus a couple of users you already follow who are similar to this user.
What I don’t like about the site is you’re only provided with one page of results. Worse? I’d think the next logical question after first using this site is what other Twitters would be ‘so who am I similar to?’ but there’s no obvious or easy way to do this. I found a workaround though. I entered a few names of people I follow and the users on their results list included ‘similar to krislynch’ a few times.
Here is my current TwitterCounter graph. Oddly I’ve never experienced a drop in users other than when Twitter might do some housecleaning and drop possible spammers.
If you’re a statistics nut like me, you might like TwitterCounter. You’ll get the obvious stats – number of followers – but you’ll also see prediction and comparison data. If you browse through the list of the top 10,000 Twitterers, you’ll see their ranking and how many followers they’ve gained or lost over the past day.
An even more impressive Twitter statistics tool is TweetStats. Here you’ll see very complete statistics including number of followers, who you tweet the most, what application(s) you use most often. It even details on which days of the week and times of day you use Twitter the most. Click on the Tweet Cloud tag and in addition to your cloud you’ll also see the top 5 words you tweet and the number of twooshes you’ve sent. What’s a twoosh, you ask? It’s a 140-character tweet.
TweetWheel is an interesting online application that uses a wheel display to display your followers in terms of how they know your other followers – kind of a ‘who’s following who’ type of wheel graph. Understandably this tool can be fairly slow to load, but it’s worth waiting for so give it a try.
PowerTwitter is a fairly new plug-in for Firefox users that embeds photos you’d otherwise see as links. Install the add-on and then go to your normal Twitter update screen. Other than a minor logo change and seeing photos and link details, and a new search engine, the rest of the site looks and works just as it did before.
- Image via CrunchBase
I had been using Twhirl as my Twitter tool (on my laptop), but I’ve recently switched to TweetDeck. I actually like Twhirl better but I can see more content all at once using TweetDeck so at least for now, it’s won out as my every day tool. I still use TwitterBerry on my BlackBerry Curve, but once my 32GB iPod Touch arrives this week, I’ll probably switch to using Twitterific.
I realize this post is a bit dry, so I hope the information contained makes up for it. I’ll write about some other Twitter tools soon since I have about 30 saved in my bookmarks!
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=7290d3f9-8862-4564-8f67-4b5f7d4d7260)
Blog updates December 7, 2008
Posted by Kristin Lynch in : technology , add a comment
Image by luc legay via Flickr
I’ve finally gotten around to running some upgrades on my blog. I upgraded WordPress to the newest Release Candidate and two other minor upgrades just since last night.
You’ll also notice I’ve finally added my Flickr, Facebook and Twitter content to the new version of my site/blog.
The plug-in installation process is so simple I’ll need to exercise some restraint here or this site could really become a mess very quickly.
More soon…
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=b26fcea6-4dec-45a1-a772-853d774e37f5)
