The other day I was stuck on the DC Metro for two hours after one of the cars on our train derailed. What an twitter opportunity. Imagine my chagrin at not being able to find my phone in the bottom of my overstuffed backpack!
With the recent twitter chatter about downtime and integration, I wanted to post just a few of the useful links I've recently discovered.
Twitter tools
Several hard-core twitter users use various clients or tools to assist in twittering. Here are some resources to find out more:
- NetworkWorld posted a useful presentation on the Top 12 Twitter Tools.
- Courtney Sellers is putting together http://www.twoolz.
com which will also list a variety of twitter tools.
- rememberthemilk is an online to-do list that stands alone or can be configured to interact with twitter and other applications for free or for a small annual fee.
When twitter goes down ...
Many people turn to other tools when twitter goes down -- here are just a few:
- friendfeed allows you to add feeds from several socialmedia sites (twitter, facebook, linkedin, blogs, etc.) to create a more comprehensive picture of what you and your friends are doing online.
- Stan Schroeder and Michael Arrington suggest twitter addicts turn to twiddict to deal with twitter downtimes.
Organize your Tweets with Hashtags
Every year I take our church youth group up to Creation Festival Northeast. This year I thought it would be fun and helpful to tweet the event so parents and other youth (not going) can keep tabs on what we're doing.
One of the groups I'm associated with suggested we use hashtags to identify specific content relevant to our group -- so I've adopted the following strategy:
- If you want to identify your tweets as relevant to a specific topics, you can use hashtags. Basically, include "#keyword in any tweet that is keyword-related.
Remember, you only have 140 characters to work with, so make your keyword short but relevant.
For the hardcore twitter user -- use Twitter's track feature to get these tweets dropped wherever you want.
For the general twitter user, there are services like Tweetscan (which offers real-time twitter search) where you can check out the twitterverse at your leisure on the keyword front.
You can tweet to the tag with this:
http://twitter.com/home? status=#keyword
Or simply append your tweets with "#keyword"
Then, interested parties can subscribe to:
http://twemes.com/keyword.rss and follow the conversation.
For more on how to do this, go to http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Hashtags
What twitter tools and add-ons do you use?
