One thing that I like to use Twitter for is to search the site for news that have not been posted yet on the majority of Internet sites. It is also a great tool to find articles and reviews that you would not otherwise stumble upon.

The new Twitter client MetroTwit is one of the most sophisticated Twitter clients for the Windows operating system. The software concentrates on Twitter, and keeps everything else to a minimum. The developers have taken inspiration in Microsoft’s Metro design and created their application with it in mind.

The interface itself is clean and functional. What I like the most about the new client is the fact that you can add information streams to the interface easily, some even without logging in.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the streams are divided into columns in the interface. They show the name and avatar of the Twitter user as well as the message and the time of posting. Links are clickable, as are hash tags. Conversations are identified properly and displayed as well in the interface.

New information streams are added via the plus icon in the lower left corner of the screen. Users who are not logged in can only add Twitter searches, user profiles or public tweets as streams. Logged in users get friends, mentions, direct messages, favorite tweets as well as personal tweets and retweets in addition to that.

All streams are updated automatically by MetroTwit. A refresh button is available in the footer area to refresh all streams manually.

New users should click on the Settings button to open the program settings. Here they can make changes to the display, for instance by switching from a light theme to a dark theme. Alerts and sounds are configured in the settings as well. The Twitter client displays notifications on the desktop whenever new messages are added to one of the streams. It is possible to change sounds and notifications here.

The settings list updating options and Twitter API information, plus a selection of services that can be automatically used by the MetroTwit user. This ranges from selecting a url shortening service over a media service to upload images to location based services to lookup maps and addresses.

Users who want to sign in need to sign in first on Twitter and authorize the application there. A pin is displayed on Twitter which they then need to enter into the MetroTwit sign in form.

All in all, MetroTwit is one of the best Twitter clients for Windows available. Companies and organizations can use the program for instance to see mentions of their company name, their own tweets, post by followers and their own tweets all at once.

MetroTwit is currently offered as a beta version. The program needs the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 to run. Downloads are currently free and offered at the developer website.

TwitterSearch is a handy Twitter extension for the Opera web browser. It combines search with notifications, which makes it a powerful extension for Twitter users, and those who monitor Twitter for news.

The extension adds a single button to the Opera address bar. A click on the button triggers the search form. Just enter a search term into the form and hit the enter key afterwards to search Twitter for that phrase.

The latest hits are displayed right in the same interface, no need to go to Twitter or another page to read the tweets. Links are directly displayed so that they can be followed directly without having to load the message on Twitter or another website.

The Opera extension does not update the search results automatically. A small slider beneath the search form determines if the extension checks for new tweets automatically. Available intervals range from every five minutes to every three hours.

The new message count is then displayed directly on the extension’s icon in the Opera address bar. Opera needs to remain open for that, but the Twitter search window can be closed.

What I really like is the fact that you can interact with the tweets directly. But it is not only the messages that you can interact with. If you click on an author’s name, you see all the tweets of that Twitter user in the search results window.

If you know the name you can use the from:name search parameter to directly display tweets from that user.

What’s missing? An option to monitor multiple phrases would be nice. There is also no back button to go back a page, for instance if you clicked on a username in the interface.

Opera users can installer TwitterSearch for Opera directly from the Opera extensions repository.

The standard procedure to post a new message is to open the Twitter website, log into the account and enter the text of the new message. That’s ok if you do a few posts per week, not so if you do dozens a day.

Twitterbar is a Firefox add-on that brings the functionality of posting and searching to the address bar of the web browser. The Firefox user needs to link at least one Twitter account to the add-on after installation. It is possible to link and use multiple accounts, handy if more than one account is used by a single user. The Twitter login details, username and password, do not need to be entered, the program opens the Twitter page were it needs to be authorized to communicate with Twitter.

The add-on adds an icon to the address form of the browser, moving the mouse cursor on that icon displays options to post the url to Twitter or to perform a search using One Riot, a social web search engine.

twitterbar

The remaining chars are displayed next to the action icons which means that it is possible to add a message to the url easily. It is also possible to simply remove the url and write a message without url. This can be posted to Twitter by either moving the mouse over the post icon or by adding –post to the end of the message. This displays an account selection screen to select the Twitter account the message should be posted on.

A search is performed in a similar fashion. Either add –search to the end of the search phrase or move the mouse over the search icon in the address bar, a click will perform the search in a new tab in the browser.

Twitterbar is available for all versions of Firefox from Firefox 3.5 to the latest Firefox 4.0 releases.

There are obviously two factors that play a role here. The amount of traffic that can come from Twitter depends largely on the Twitter users who post links pointing to a website on Twitter. The more users and the higher their follower count the better. It certainly depends on the content as well but the content is usually of interest if it is posted by a user.

Some webmasters like to monitor the dynamic process more thoroughly. The default Twitter search engine is no real help when it comes to discovering links pointing to a specific url or website on Twitter. BackTweets is a third party search engine that offers more reliable results. A search for ghacks.net would reveal nine results at the Twitter search engine and more than 4000 results at the BackTweets engine.

Results display the Twitter user who made the post, the post contents and the time it was posted. A click on the user icon or name will open the Twitter user page. A good way of finding new users to follow (and to thank them for posting links). An advanced search form is available as well which can be used to search in a specific date range or by Twitter user.

Backtweets is an interesting service for webmasters who want to analyse and increase the traffic that Twitter is sending to their websites.

The service displays keyword trends and examples like iPhone, Obama or Superbowl that can be clicked on to perform the search as well. Spy will search its index for occurrences of the entered or clicked on keyword. It uses Ajax to update the search screen automatically. Search results are ordered by relevance.

The service makes use of two display modes. Poster mode makes use of speech bubbles displaying user avatars and the messages.

While Spy is not the most thorough search engine out there it can be used for several purposes. It can be used to read reactions on blog posts or follow conversations about recent events.

Results are displayed with user icons and and a preview of the message that has been published at Twitter. Searches can also be filtered by username. If you want to search all messages at Twitter from a specific user you can do so by leaving the keyword field blank and only entering the username in the second form.

Tweet Scan can be added as a search engine to the list of possible search engines if you use Firefox. I have not tried it with other browsers but it will probably work as well.

It seems that registered users can also receive updates per email. I did not want to register to the website and could not check that out though.