Twitter is becoming the de facto communication and knowledge share platform for millions of users on a daily basis. How best to manage your Twitter account? How do you target your followers? What systems and tools are best to manage your Twitter experience? What mobile application to use? These and other issues will be offered in the Social Media Studio's "Twitter Tools" class.
social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default, however senders can restrict message delivery to their followers. Users may subscribe to other users' tweets—this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers.[ Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" that was held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. While sitting in a park on a children’s slide and eating Mexican food, Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group.[12] The original project code name for the service was twttr, inspired by Flickr and the five character length of American SMS short codes. The developers initially considered "10958" as a short code, but later changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability."[13] Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST): "just setting up my twttr."[14][W]e came across the word "twitter," and it was just perfect. The definition was "a short burst of inconsequential information," and "chirps from birds." And that’s exactly what the product was.—Jack Dorsey[15]The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006.[6] In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey, and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo and all of its assets–including Odeo.com and Twitter.com–from the investors and shareholders.[16] Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007. It is estimated that Twitter has 190 million users, generating 65 million tweets a day and handling over 800,000 search queries per day.
For the geekiest Twitter users, Tweepi delivers a mathematical breakdown to help you decide if you have spammers or deadbeats among your friends and followers that you need to purge. The four modules Tweepi showcases are a Follow, Flush, Reciprocate, and Cleanup – all of which help to manage your network quickly and with plenty of numerical detail to help you make your tougher decisions.
Twubs are Twitter groups built around content aggregated from #hashtags.
An essential service for many Twitter users. This site is all about automation. With Tweet Later, you can automatically 1) send ‘thank you’ and welcome messages to new followers, 2) “return-follow” your new followers and 3) schedule tweets to be delivered at a specified time in the future.
Twitscoop is a real-time visualisation tool which enables users to “Mine the thought stream” provided by Twitter. The algorithm used cuts every English non-spam tweets into pieces (“tags”), and ranks them by how frequently they are used versus normal usage. The web application detects growing trends in real-time, identifies breaking news (earthquakes, plane crashes, political events, new tech products etc.) and monitors specific keywords along with custom graphs that display the activity for any given word on twitter.
Tweettronics is a tool to analysis, discover, track and engage with Twitter conversations about your products, brands, and topics.
Spy is an easy-to-use tool that visualizes the conversations on Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, Blogs and other social networks. This can listen in on the social media conversations you’re interested in.
Retweetrank lets you find rank of any twitter user. With the rank, latest retweets of the user are shown and an RSS feed can also be grabbed for the same. Monitoring retweets can provide a better understanding of audience to the originator while others can see the most interesting tweets of a user.
With TwitterFriends you can find out the hidden network of Twitter contacts that are really relevant for you.
Twitter Karma makes up for its simple design by providing a quick solution to see all of your friends and followers sorted in a variety of ways. You can follow and unfollow quickly and easily among your friends, followers, and mutual friends.
a free tool that makes cash tracking easy! Get a grip on your spending!
Track time and expenses via Twitter (or email, SMS, IM, call and say your expenses, use the FireFox Plugin, etc). Tag, search, import, export, track mileage, convert currencies
Flackr is a realtime news tracker dashboard that carries Twitter news sources, twitpic images and comments. Flackr tracks many different news sources on twitter.
Xefer is great tool that analyses your Twitter and at present data of your tweet volume, concentration in addition to their quality, which is measured by replies.
Tweetag display the most discussed topics in the last 24h in general, or the most talked topics related to a given topic. You can also get a free email alert whenever a keyword appears in Twitter Lists of your choice.
Tweetply tracks down popular tweets that with a lot of replies.
It helps you track down the links you share on Twitter
For someone who wants even more control over their Twitter account, ReFollow provides a slew of features for any power user. You can view not only your friends and followers, but those who are friends or followers of any other particular user, or any user who has ever @mentioned you. These can all be sorted by last tweet, tweet count, alphabetical by username, or their friend/follower counts. There’s also a ton of filterable options if you need to get very specific.
For people who like to manually label their friends and followers to get a better handle on who’s who, Twittangle allows users to form groups to better manage who they follow, or who’s following them. It also displays your friends and followers with a unique column view. You can rate them, add and apply tags to each of them, add them to unique groups, or see other users’ groups.
TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. The service analyzes your last 1000 tweets and works best on users who have posted more than 1000 updates. It also works best on accounts that are operated by a single user and use Twitter in a conversational manner, rather than simply a content distribution platform.
Check how much time you spend of Twitter
Check out the top Twitter users and find out your Twitter stats on Twitterholic.