3 apps to maximize your Twitter experience!
If the words “Twitter” and “tweet” sound more like noises outside your bedroom window than a Web 2.0 application, you’re behind the technological curve. Here’s a quick refresh: Twitter is an online service that allows any subscriber to update his or her profile with updates of no more than 140 words. It’s like having a little place to yourself for doing nothing but writing Facebook-esqe status updates. Only Twitter is more often used to expand beyond a private little corner and share one’s innermost life updates with the world. In reading your updates, other Twitter users have the option to subscribe–or “follow”–what you’re posting. And you can follow them as well to see what they’re up to. Easy? Well, the popularity of Twitter has blown it beyond just a simple status update engine. True, the core function remains the same, but the user base has expanded in its size and scope:
- Corporations Twitter: Their employees use the service to officially (or unofficially) interact with customers in a real-time setting.
- Celebrities Twitter: Want lunch with Shaquille O’Neal? Follow his Twitter and say hi to him in the restaurant. You might even get free tickets to a game!
- Too many people Twitter: From George Stephanopoulos’s less-than-thrilling Twitter interview with Arizona Senator John McCain to jurors who Twitter during trials, Twitter is pushing straight into the common vernacular. And it’s not always for the best.
Face it: Twitter is here to stay. That said, there are a number of different ways to make the most out of this emerging communications platform. We’ve come up with three different applications that help you maximize your presence in the Twitter cloud. Whether you’re intending to contribute or lurk, each provides a functionality far greater than that of the boring ol’ default Twitter interface.
Like a waterfall for words, Twitterfall is a real-time stream of every single (non-protected) update that gets posted to the service. Expect a backlog of information even when you set the posts to enter the display at a rate of one per second there’s just that much information flowing into Twitter. You can set the service to display tweets based on popular trend words or your own custom search, functionality that makes this tool invaluable for discovering the up-to-the-minute buzz on a particular topic.
For those who want to read as well as contribute to Twitter, TweetDeck is a powerful, Adobe Air-based application that you can download to your PC and use to interact with the service. It displays your personal Twitter profile in a columnar format. From there, you can add additional columns into the mix depending on your preferences. This can include a real-time feed for direct messages and Twitter replies to your updates, a listing of tweets related to keywords you select, and powerful grouping functionality to help segment your (many) Twitter friends.
Similar to TweetDeck, the application Twhirl breaks away from a column-based organization and displays Twitter information in a single, tab-based window. You can do all the same activities you could in TweetDeck: send tweets, look at replies and direct messages to tweets you’ve posted, and generate real-time feeds of information based around particular keywords you select. The added benefit that Twhirl brings to the table over TweetDeck is that it allows you to conduct Twitter business across multiple accounts simultaneously. It’s a perfect choice for those wishing to maintain both “corporate” and “personal” Twitter identities, if the two can even be distinguished.
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