Eleven Twitter tools I like

Okay, to be clear: I am not a Twitter fanatic. I do think Twitter can and should be used in a wonderful and wild variety of ways. Maybe you want to network with thought leaders in your professional niche. Or let friends and family track your cross-country road trip. Maybe you want to know snow and ski conditions in the Rockies. Be the most popular guy at the prom. Maybe you want to find a job. A client. A friend. Who knows. But no matter how extensively or narrowly you want to use Twitter, there are tools to help you.

The list below is for avid readers, information gluttons, people who like to share interesting articles, and the curious. It is *not* for Testy Tweeters -- those who think there is only one correct path to Twitter, and that path is deadly serious. This list may not even be much use for anyone who is systematically trying to build a cohesive brand strategy with trackable, measurable results. It is simply a list of tools and sites I think have improved my own Twitter experience.

1. http://hashtags.org/ See what topics people are following
2. http://tinyurl.com/create.php Create those short URLs to pass on links to articles of interest.
3. search.twitter.com See what people are talking about
4. http://friendfeed.com/ Okay, this one is aspirational for me at the moment. I just set up my FriendFeed account and am musing about whether it is useful for anyone besides, well, me.
5. http://www.wefollow.com/ User-powered Twitter directory and great place to find people you want to follow.
6. http://www.atebits.com/software/tweetie/ Tweetie for iPhone - I love it because it lets me manage multiple accounts and it is easy to use.
7. http://twittercounter.com/pages/100 Top 100 people in your time zone. If you go to twittercounter.com, it gives you the top number of tweets, top number of followers, top number of friends, and so on. It is a fun time sink.
8. http://useqwitter.com/ Twitter tells me who started following me, but does not tell me who stops when people elect not to follow any more. To be honest, at the moment, I don't much care, because most people who start and stop following seem to be direct marketers. But over time, I will want to know. So, I signed up today and will see how it goes.
9. http://twinfluence.com/ Most reach. Most "velocity." Most "social capital." To explain this will take another blog post, but it is really interesting. This site speaks most to what I want to do on Twitter - which is extend my reach and social capital to meet people who do interesting things and exchange ideas.
10. http://tweetgrid.com/ Build a - well, grid - or dashboard of topics you want to follow to see the latest tweets.
11. http://twitter.grader.com/ I like this because it tells me where I rank (in the world) and how I score (I need to figure out what a perfect 100 is and how to get it :-).) It gives me a graph of how my followers and those I follow are trending. It lets me know who ranks highly in my local area of Denver and Castle Rock. Just good solid statistics in a variety of areas.

Interesting tools that are on hold for one reason or another:

http://www.tweetwheel.com/ Who knows whom? The tweetwheel will tell you if someone you're following knows someone else you're following. It builds a wheel of interaction, which is cool, if not obviously useful. Has taken too long to load each time I have tried it - it eventually times out.

http://twitterless.com/ Twitterless tells you who stops following you and graphs your follower history over time, making this info available in a variety of useful views.