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.

Thinking about Twitter?

Lessons in Twitter Hygiene from Clo Willaerts is a handy dandy quick guide to help you avoid initial easy-to-make mistakes. Gotta love the hype cycle concept too.

For example, I did subscribe to a bot (daylife_feed) and, though it initially satisfied my news jones, the original news sources - the journalists, pundits, commentators and bloggers - are on Twitter, so you don't need an aggregator. If you *do* want to isolate a keyword or phrase for, say, your company, daylife_feed is good for that. Of course, so is search.twitter.com.

Something off the wall

Here is a link to "Made Up Words in the Simpsons," cataloguing and explaining such immortal terms as craptacular, Dorkus malorkus, cromulent and crisatunity.

Measuring Online Influence

This is a great article by Micah Baldwin on how you can discern whether someone is viewed as an expert by an online community - and, by extension, how you can develop your personal brand.

"In terms of measuring online influence, the stronger the personal brand, the more influence one wields online. The most important component of online influence is trust. Trust is defined as creating a consistent expectation that a person will always act in your best interest when given information."

Real-time search using Twitter and Google

http://mt-hacks.com/tag/twitter/

This guy at Movable Type Hacks has some intriguing plugins. To search the five most recent tweets on a topic, he created a GreaseMonkey script. YOu have to get the plugin for Firefox. but it's an interesting concept, as is the overarching question of whether Twitter is a threat to Google, and, if so, how.

If the link above does not work, use http://mt-hacks.com.

How to grow your blog to the next level with SEO

How to grow your blog to the next level with SEO
Nice common sense article by Darren Rouse about what to do to promote your blog once you're out of stealth mode. (I'm just bookmarking this for later review.)

24/7 Wall St. Ranks the Most Valuable Blogs

24/7 Wall St. chose the 25 most valuable blogs, based on a pretty loose set of criteria.

The most interesting thing about this? The Perez Hilton site is worth an estimated $32 million. For writing campy tripe and drawing on pictures with his white markers, Mario Lavandeira apparently earns nearly $9 million a year in advertising revenue. He's a hard-working guy with a definite, tireless talent for self-promotion - don't get me wrong. Just WOW, though.

So, what else pops out? Well, we apparently like gossip, politics, technology & gadgets, sports and financial information - in various combinations. There is some support for the notion that people tend to gravitate to like-minded people. Sugar is for girls and young women. Wowowow is for women over 40. The Huffington Post and DailyKos are largely appealing to those who are politically center-left or simply left. However, gadget geeks and investment folks are all ages, genders, locations and political affiliations, so we're still engaging in diverse interaction on a lot of topics.

I was surprised at the popularity of the women's sites. I also think women fuel the popularity of the gossip sites - purely because most of my friends who are interested in pop culture are female. So women are a force to consider now, which is amazing considering how scarce they were when I got started in this online business 15 or more years ago.

News is of interest to folks, but via Drudge or HuffPo, not CNN, MSNBC or Fox. Or, they want topic-specific news they find at SB Nation (sports), mashable and TechCrunch (technology), or the Alley Insider sites (Silicon Alley, Greensheet, and so on).

Last, site traffic seems to be on the upswing for many of these sites. So, even if advertising prices drop, I am willing to bet that readership numbers will continue to increase for well-written blogs and sites centered on those core topics - gossip, politics, technology & gadgets, sports and financial information. MAybe I'll go sign up for Google's AdSense and dip my toe in.