My Twitter Apps

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Twitter has grown so fast and is so large that in order to find people to follow, you really need some help. My favorite directory for this is Twellow. Twellow (a service of WebProNews) allows you to search by occupation or niche and has set up a series of categories that cover just about everything. If you do not see the category you want, ask them to add it.

You can either browse these categories or look through the entire list. The list is overwhelming, so I suggest browsing first. When you click on a category, Twellow tells you their name, their Twitter name, the number of followers, when they joined Twitter, and their bio.  You can also see some of their tweets.

To login to Twellow, and claim your profile, you need to use the ID and password you use for Twitter. You may already be listed in the directory, but you can edit the profile and add categories. Once logged in, you can see your friends and followers as well. There is also a fun tab called “TwellowHood” that lets you search by geography.

Twibs is a business directory for Twitter that allows you to search by the name of the business. You can sort by the number of followers, or alphabetically.  The businesses on the home page are there by popular vote.

Each entry gives you the Twitter name of the company, the number of followers, and the location, as well as their bio. If the company has added their business to the directory, they can pick the labels or hashtags that they want to be known for. Adding your business to Twibs is free, and you do not have to be a mega-conglomerate (like Starbucks).

If you are logged into Twitter, you can tweet the company directly (look for the button on the right), and vote for them to be on the home page. Once you have voted for them, you can then ask your followers to vote as well.

I find Twibs to be very useful when I know the name of the company.

The newest user-generated Twitter directory has just been launched by Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg. WeFollow is covered by this post at Mashable, and looks to be an interesting experiment.

Alltop, while technically not a user directory for Twitter, does have a Twitterati section. Here you can see who Alltop thinks are some of the more famous and/or more vocal Twitter peeps.

Twitseeker allows you to search for keywords in people’s tweets. It does ask you for your login information for Twitter because it is using the Twitter API to search through the Tweetstream, but manages to forget it after a query is done.

Although the tool itself is still in the experimental stage, there are a lot of cool features. There are two types of searches, a simple one and an advanced one. The Simple search is just for a keyword or phrase. With the Advanced search, you can specify location, words or phrase, maximum number of pages to search and Twitterers to list, as well as deciding how many times a person has to be tweeting with the same term to qualify.

The default maximum number of pages is 10 and 25 people listed. In the list of peeps, if you mouse over the Twitter bird, you can see the person’s bio, the cloud shows a tag cloud for their tweets, and the circle shows if you are following them or they are following you. It also shows how many followers they have and the number of times they have tweeted on the topic.

Twitseeker appears to be using Twitinfluence to help it find the information. The only drawback I found was that if you click on the Twitterer’s name (which is a link to their profile page), the page comes up for a second, and then defaults to their background. I also discovered that the Simple Search is best when used with one word keywords. If you want a phrase, I suggest using the Advanced Search.