Hey, it’s Friday! Time for another Friday Five. Today’s topic is for those of you who’ve created Twitter accounts but haven’t figured out what exactly to do with them besides sharing the details of your breakfast or how you feel about last night’s episode of American Idol. Sometimes you need to look beyond Twitter itself to find third-party solutions to common problems–Twitter makes it easy for developers to create their own solutions. Here are five of my favorites.
1. A decent Twitter client
Sure, you can use Twitter’s web interface to post, browse, and search–but I find that Twitter becomes a much more useful tool for communication and zeitgeist tracking when you use a standalone Twitter client. This software runs on your computer, behind the scenes while you’re doing other things, not unlike your e-mail program. It’s ready to go when you want to catch up on new tweets or share your latest thought or interesting link. I personally use Tweetie, a Mac-only application, and its iPhone counterpart.
Other popular clients include TweetDeck, Twhirl, and Seismic; all of which run on Macs and PCs alike. The Twitter Fan Wiki has a lengthy list of Twitter clients–I recommend experimenting with different ones to find what works best for you.
2. FriendOrFollow
As in the real world, Twitter followers and friends may come and go. You’re not given any notification if someone stops following you, and finding this information can become the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack search using Twitter’s interface. FriendOrFollow parses your followers and followees, giving you a visual list of accounts you follow (but they don’t follow you back), accounts following you (but you don’t follow them back), and “friends,” or those you follow that also follow you.
3. TwitterFeed
If you share with others outside of Twitter–through a blog, YouTube channel, or Flickr, for example–TwitterFeed makes automatically sharing new content easy. Just enter the RSS feed for your content and check a couple of settings, and anytime TwitterFeed spots new content it will post a link on Twitter. We use this to share links to new blog content, as well as links to other sites we’ve shared through our Delicious account.
4. TweetStats
Curious about how your Twitter use has evolved over time? What day of the week are you most likely to post? Who do you reply to the most? TweetStats can answer all of these questions and give you some pretty graphs to share with others in the process. It will also generate a “Tweet Cloud” of your most commonly-used words, and even help you compose a Wordle summary of your Twitter prolificacy.
5. What the Trend?
Following trending topics on Twitter is a great way to keep a finger on the zeitgeist. If you’re not sure what that trending topic means, however, visit What The Trend? to find crowdsourced explanations of what keywords and hash tags mean.
How about you?
What are your favorite Twitter tools? If I’ve left out a good one, let us know about it in the comments below, or suggest a topic for a future Friday Five. Have a great weekend!
Photo: Niall Kennedy on Flickr
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Tags: Twitter
