The 5 twitter tools you need

After a few weeks of exploring the twitterverse (there is a whole new lexicon for this world) here are the 5 tools I have found most useful.

Desktop Apps
Lets take Tweetdeck first, it's built on the Adobe AIR framework and in terms of stability and speed it's been faultless.

The facility for monitoring favourite searches, as you can see one of mine is #magento, is absolutely invaluable. I recommend this application highly.

I also decided to give Twhirl a go as we have now set up a couple of twitter logins for the business. tweetdeck only handles one login at a time, Twhirl will let you monitor multiple accounts. The interface is a little too compact for my liking, others may completely disagree. The defining plus was the multiple account feature, otherwise, I'm plumping for tweetdeck.

Mobile Apps
Now, in my previous post I had a bit of a gripe about users outside of the UK not being able to effectively use twitter because the SMS service is not available here. Ahem.....jumped the gun a bit.

The first challenge was to be able to receive instant updates of incoming tweets from those people I follow. The solution, tweetbymail, I had the system set up in under 5 minutes and was recieiving emails to my Blackberry Curve straightaway. As well as reciving your updates you can send a tweet by emailing your unique address at tweetbymail. I didn't use this facility as I also loaded....

...TwitterBerry
This is a great little app for any 'berry users, fast, stable and easy to use. I downloaded it OTA (over the air), had it installed and running in less than 5 mins. Perfect.

Lastly we come to search.twitter.com. I highly recommend you go here, throw in a few search terms for subjects and trends you are interested in and see what comes out. This is my favoured route for finding new searches to follow in tweetdeck, for finding interesting people with similar interests and research.....I needed to know why the Liverpool fans were throwing socks on the pitch during the FA Cup replay and twitter search found me the answer in seconds. if you're interested, here's the link.

So those are the tools I have found most useful.....now...what the hell is twitter good for? More on that soon.

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