Stuff you can do with Twitter: A WATBlog Super List
Twitter is becoming one of the most important platforms to share information quickly and easily over the web. Using the Twitter API, developers have found a lot of innovative ways to keep the users hooked on to the service by packing hundreds of services.
Sometimes, less is more. Here, just 140 characters are more than enough I’d say! So I thought of compiling a super huge list of things you can do with Twitter, that you had no idea about as a newbie. Of course, the possibilities are huge, and I might have left out something, do add on in such a case.
Desktop Applications
This is the most used desktop client out there and brings all the features of Twitter on the web and more right on your desktop. Operated by Adobe AIR, it lets you tweet, manage friends, view profiles, search for keywords/hashtags and it even shows you the trending topics, shortens your URLs for you (via bit.ly) lets you favourite tweets etc.
It even has a really nifty button via Twitpic to upload your images!
A very user friendly interface and integration with various services makes it convenient and very addictive. They have even added Facebook Connect recently, which allows you to post your updates on Facebook too. The only feature missing is that it doesn’t allow for multiple accounts.
A new client, it is the competitor to Tweetdeck and allows you to add multiple clients at once. It can come in real handy if you want to manage the company account and the personal account at the same time. Though the interface isn’t as neat as Tweetdeck, it still has some pretty nice Tweaks in its arsenal. Like supporting various URL shorteners, having a new column for updates you sent out etc.
Seesmic is looking to outperform Tweetdeck by simply adding integration with more services. Like you can capture images directly via webcam and upload them through 5 different services! The developers have recently acquired Twhirl, another popular desktop client and we can expect some great stuff from these guys in the near future!
Firefox Plugins
Expectedly, the Firefox pool is also full of add-ons catering to Twitter users and some of them add great value to the popular micro-blogging service.
Twitbin is the latest in this category and can be used to send and receive messages from Twitter in a neat sidebar (that can be a bit obtrusive sometimes).
This is one of the most popular Twitter addons and lets you do pretty cool stuff like send DMs, reply to tweets and keep a track on your followers! All in all, it’s a very handy little piece of coding.
iPhone Twitter apps
Hahlo has set the bar really high in design and functionality of iPhone apps for Twitter and has been getting good reviews ever since it was launched. The icons are not crystal clear as to what they do, but it should just take you two minutes to get the hang of it. Sadly, it’s a web based app unlike most of the new native apps for Twitter on iPhone.
This cute little app does some neat things with Twitter, like providing you with a location tool. This tool can narrow down where you are currently and also lets you see who’s around you anywhere from 1 to 252,000 miles away using local cell phone towers or your Wi-Fi connection. It even has a built in photo integration that uses the iPhone’s camera to post pictures directly!
Share Music
This is basically like Twitter for music, and you can share tracks with other users in real time! It also integrates with other sites like Friendfeed etc. and you can share and publish tracks back out to your Twitter stream, all in one click! You can build your own DJ station by adding tracks and then meet people with similar tastes.
There is currently no way to upload pictures and other visual stuff in Twitter, and so we have to use these party services. Here are the most popular ones.
Share Pictures
Twitpic is the largest and most popular image sharing service on Twitter, which sprung into the limelight when the first pictures of the Hudson River plane crash were shared here. The interface and process is really simple, and you don’t need to be a power user to work it out.
Share Videos
The site is very simple to use, you just need to log in with your Twitter account, choose your video file (up to 1GB or 20 mins) and hit the button! Crazily cool, eh?
Share documents
Unlike pictures and videos, there aren’t many services to share documents but Filetwt can come in really handy. You can share any file up to 20 MB with your friends; and even give the options of sharing it just with a friend or your entire network! Some new features in the pipeline include integration with Google Maps, the ability to retweet files, and access to your file sharing history.
Twitter Research
This is the perfect tool for researching individual behavior on Twitter. It churns out all kind of data for you like, how often do you actually tweet, how often do you @reply, trends of individual accounts etc. and puts them into visual charts and graphs for better understanding. I mean, what else can you possibly want?
Twitter Trends
This is a new favorite among us analysts and is ideal for comparing information and keeping yourself updated on Twitter trends. It can compare stats on other Social Media platforms too! Its twitter graphs can provide you graphing of keyword mentions on hourly basis and you can even compare them against your blog mentions.
Though Twitter gives you a real time list of trending topics, such visual graphs can really help you in grabbing the useful data out from all the noise on Twitter.
This service uses stream graphs to display keywords and tags, based on a thousand recent tweets. The older the tweets, the better is the visualization accuracy. A screenshot can be seen below.
Search Services
Though there has been talk of the hits on Twitter search increasing by 400% within months, I still rely on other services to give me real time search data in a user friendly format. The top on my list is Twazzup, which has been around for quite some time now and constantly improving!
After you type your query, you can see results in the left column which gets updated in real time. If you mouseover a profile, you get options like “follow”, their location, website links etc. The more you play around with the service, the more depth is revealed in this very well developed application.
Twitter Tutorial
And finally, you can check this awesome YouTube video which will completely explain Twitter to you – in plain layman’s English!
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twitter is the next big thing! i love using it to keep on track of my friends and loveones. Kudos to those who made twitter and other web 2.0 social networking sites.