My Twitter Apps

Have you seen some of those cool backgrounds for Twitter? How do they do that?

TwitBacks has a number of categories for backgrounds and lets you put in your contact details as well. They let you put links on your background to your social networks, and will help you promote your Twitter profile. They also offer a customized background for $99.

FreeTwitterDesigner also has free backgrounds. I really like their easy to use interface. These are straight graphics without any bells or whistles.

You can just use a graphic image to use as background as well.

When Twitter first started, a lot of people thought that you could judge a person by the number of followers they had. In other words, a person would be considered popular if they has a large number of others following them.

As Twitter usage has grown, this has become less and less important. It is not the number of followers, but rather how much the person engages those followers.

Let me give you an example. A certain person on Twitter has 37,000 followers from using one of the many auto following programs. This software automatically follows people for him, waits until they follow back, and then unfollows them.  This results in a huge following, BUT none of these people really know who the main person is.

The person in question does not engage any of these followers. He tends to schedule his tweets in advance, and never stops to actually talk to anyone, nor does he RT other people’s posts. IMHO, he is little more than a robot here on Twitter, which does not make me want to follow him, nor to ask questions.

Twitter is all about engaging your followers, your prospects, and your customers. Why else would you want to be active here? Many of us share information, ask and answer questions, and even repost (ReTweet) other tweets. (Just don’t get me started on people who protect their updates! That is a whole ‘nother post.)

Many of us who have been on Twitter for longer than a year understand this. People like @ChrisBrogan, @iamkhayyam, @debng, and myself (@searchguru) have worked hard to build up their followers by talking and sharing with them.

Try it. Reach out and share information, or a pleasant thought with someone else. It doesn’t hurt.

There is a feature on Twitter called Favorites. You can make a tweet a Favorite and share it with others, or just go back and read it later.

One of the problems with this is trying to sort through all your Favorites at once. If you are like me, you tend to mark tweets as Favorites so you can come back to them later. As a result, I have pages and pages of them.

I have just discovered that you can see your Faves as an RSS feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. If you are older than 30, think of those electric ticker tape signs. If you are under 30, you probably know what it is.

Simply type into your browser,  http://twitter.com/favorites/(your Twitter name).rss . That will bring up all your faves in an easy to read stream of links.

Tweetabix interviews Twitter users as to how they use Twitter, whether for fun, community or business. Richard McKay (@holeinhiseye) runs this site and asks each person what they think about Twitter and its future.

This is a great resource for newbies and the general public to learn about Twitter.

TweetBeep allows you to track a particular subject or mention of a website on Twitter. It will send you email updates when the topic or website you are following appears, even if a URL shortener has been used.

This service would be an excellent tool for companies that want to keep an eye on their brand, or for people researching a particular subject.

Twitter Alerts – TweetBeep.com.

A lot of questions are asked every day on Twitter ranging from the specific (what websites to use to book travel,  where to find program applications and tutorials) to the general (what’s the best place for dinner, what is a gerbil). Sometimes the questioner gets a direct answer, sometimes not. To help all of those in need, TweetBrain has appeared.

TweetBrain pulls out the questions from the tweetstream, and allows peeps to answer them directly in more than 140 characters. A link to the answer is then posted on Twitter, telling the person asking that an answer can be found and giving the URL. The FAQ on Tweetbrain is one of the best ones I have ever seen, explaining all the ins and outs of the application.

Tweetbrain is free to join, and anyone can answer questions. It provides an excellent way of sharing your expertise, and building your brand. I highly recommend this app.

Twitter know lets you see what the trending topics are on your Twitter home page. However, many of us do not have a clue what these topics actually are.

What the Trend? to the rescue! This application (by Matt Mayer) explains what the topics are, when they started and the last time they were tweeted about. If you click on a trend, you can see the tweets, any news or photos (from Flickr) about the subject as well.

You can also follow @whatthetrend on Twitter.

Visible Tweets lets you see tweets as a tag cloud, animated, or as rotating letters. While it is very pretty, I do not really see the usefulness of it. Since Tweets are read, not audio, most of us can do the visulaization ourselves.  The tag cloud part might be useful if you are not sure what part of the tweet is a subject….

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.

Image via Wikipedia

ChirpCity allows you to see who is tweeting from and about your city. It also shows a top user list for each city. The cities are arranged in alphabetical order and covers the U.S. and Canada. There is also a Firefox and IE7 browser plugin. ChirpCity is from Roberto Martinez and you can follow him @chirpcity .