Twitter Lists introduces a new feature that third party websites have been offering for a while. A comprehensive option to build a list of Twitter users on any subject. This can be a list of all students in business 101, a list of local politicians who use Twitter or a list of the world’s most popular thinkers.

The main benefit of this approach is that someone can access the public messages of all the Twitter users in that list from the Twitter Lists page. It is possible to subscribe to a Twitter list to receive the usual updates when someone on the list posts a new message.

To sum it up: Twitter Lists makes it easier to combine the messages of various Twitter users under one roof without having to filter through additional noise that is created by messages that they receive in their standard Twitter Account.

There is still one question to be answered: How can someone find the best lists without having to manually look at the pages of Twitter users? The answer, at least for lists of prominent Twitter users, is Listorious. The service maintains a list of (currently) 140 Twitter lists sorted in categories like media, news, marketing, health or finance.

This is a good starting point to find lists of prominent Twitter users like all verified NFL players who use Twitter, journalists who cover finance and business or thought leaders of this world. On the other hand; You won’t find your high-school’s teachers there.

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This gives Windows 7 users another option of contacting the Microsoft Customer Service division. How does it work? A new support request or question can be directed at the Microsoft Support team by sending a message to their official Twitter message.

The limitations of Twitter make this a less than ideal method of contacting support for questions that require in depth explanation. It can however be a quick and efficient way to get a response for basic or short questions. Questions that have already been answered include hardware problems (network adapter or video card not working), other errors users encountered in the operating system or software related questions.

The support is currently limited to Windows 7 but Microsoft stated that they are planning to expand the scope of their support over time.

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Twitter on the other hand adds another dimension to search. Not to every search but to specific search terms that are time related. Think for instance about news of plane crashes, earthquakes and other disasters and basically anything that benefits from real time observations.

Bing has already included Twitter in their search engine. The subpage of Bing displays popular topics on Twitter by default.

A search or a click on a popular tag will display the latest tweets and top links shared by Twitter users about the selected topic.

Google on the other hand has just announced that they will be adding Twitter results to their search engine as well in the coming months. According to the announcement only search terms that can benefit from real time observations.

The main question that neither Microsoft nor Google are addressing at the moment is how the quality of the content is evaluated. Since the content is displayed more or less in real time there is no time for a manual control of the content. How are they going to differentiate between good and bad – true or false – content.

What’s your take on the development?

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Here is how Mikko describes what happended in his blog: He posted a warning about a new MySpace phishing website two month ago as a tweet using his Twitter account. This message contained an unclickable url of the phishing website to warn users and spread the word.

Twitter, after two months, figured that the url was a phishing url and made the decision to suspend the account. It is not clear if this was an automatic or manual suspension. The Twitter account of Mikko was restored after two days and the following explanations was given:

I’ve unsuspended your acct.
You were suspended for using the malware URL rnyspeceDOTcom in DMs.
Be careful!
We scan evrythng for malware.

To make matters worse all of his followers and people that he followed were not restored. Both counts showed 0.

The whole incident raises several questions:

• Why was the Twitter account banned after two months and not immediately?
• Why did no one notify the Twitter user about the suspension
• Why did it take two days to restore the account
• Why can’t the followers and followed be restored

Twitter’s reaction fell short and put the blame on the Twitter user rather on an ineffective way of handling the incident. Until things change Twitter users should be very careful what they post in Twitter.

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Yahoo Meme is still in beta but a recent silent change makes it possible to anyone to register an account without invites. That’s a big change to before and it remains to be seen if the developers have opened registrations just for a short time or permanently.

Users who want to try out Yahoo Meme can visit the main page of the service to sign in with a Yahoo account or create a new Yahoo account for that purpose. The process does not take longer than a few minutes the most.

Yahoo Meme offers many advantages over Twitter like the aforementioned ones. The only thing that it currently lacks is popularity. This could change if the service is promoted in the right way by Yahoo. You can follow Ghacks at Yahoo Meme by visiting the official Ghacks page at Yahoo Meme.

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Trendsmap is a Google Maps and Twitter mashup that solves both of these problems. The tool displays a world map that is displaying popular topics based on the region the user is looking at. It is for instance possible to see right now that the people in the Philippines are tweeting about the typhoon Pepeng while the most popular topics on the US west coast are the movie Zombieland, Halloween and the NL West Champs.

Since Trendmaps is a Google Maps mashup it is possible to zoom in and out of the map. This only makes sense in regions of the world where Twitter is a popular form of communication. A click on a popular topic will display trends and latest messages on the same screen. The box that is displayed on the right side of the website usually contains a short description of the trend and links to websites for additional information.

Trendsmap is an interesting Google Maps Twitter mashup. More so for researchers and users who like to stay up to date on certain topics.

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The developer’s of Lifestream Backup have developed their service for that reason. Lifestream Backup is a solution to backup data that is stored at various popular online services. The list of supported services reads like the who is who of the most popular online services:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Basecamp
• Gmail
• Google Docs
• Delicious
• FriendFeed
• Flickr
• Photobucket
• Zoho Writer
• Wordpress

Youtube and Blogger will soon be added to that portfolio raising the supported online services to 13. The principle is simple. All that user’s need to do is to authorize the Lifestream Backup service. This is either done by authorizing them directly at a service or by providing the username and password to that service. Lifestream Backup will start to backup data on a daily or weekly schedule. Email notifications can be send to inform the user that a backup has been performed (emails can be send after every backup or as digests).

Backups that have been created are accessible in the archives section of the backup service.Data backups are usually offered as xml files or as multimedia files. Each file can be viewed online or downloaded to the local computer system. An option to download all backed up data of a service would come in handy, especially for services like Flickr where the file count can easily reach a hundred and more.

To give one real life example: A Twitter backup consists of updates, mentions, received and send direct messages, favorites, friends and followers. The backed up data is offered in seven different XML files. No information about the data that gets backed up is available before the first backup. The developer’s should definitely add information about the data that gets backed up by their service. This usually includes the most important data but it is always better to see it in writing before configuring a backup for a specific service.

The Wordpress backup option is different from most other options. A plugin needs to be installed on the blog and a key configured so that the backups can be performed.

Invites:

The developer’s of Lifestream Backup were nice enough to provide Ghacks readers with a free one year account that can store up to 2 Gigabytes of data. These accounts are sold for $29 regularly but free for the next 24 hours if you visit the signup page that has been created for Ghacks.

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Only specific results, called Bing’s Instant Answers, can be shared this way. This includes translations, sport results, weather conditions, financial information and more.

Microsoft is now offering signups for the Bing & Ping preview.

Thanks for your interest in the Bing & Ping preview. If you want to participate in the preview program, please submit your Windows Live ID. If you do not have a Windows Live ID, you can register for one by going to https://signup.live.com. You will receive a reply confirming your acceptance into Bing & Ping via e-mail to the Windows Live ID you provided. The e-mail will provide additional details on the features we’re testing out, including some examples of how to use them.

Users who are interested to test this new feature can sign up at the Bing & Ping Preview page. Users who signup for the preview will receive an email once the service has been activated for them. The email will contain instructions and examples on how to use the service.

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Another interesting aspect of Yahoo Meme is that there does not seem to be a character limit for post. Some might like the limitation that Twitter is imposing on users but it sometimes limits how something is said due to the character limit.

Most users who currently use Yahoo Meme seem to be using it for multimedia content, especially images which seem to be the most popular memes right now. Photos can be uploaded from the local computer system or by pasting a link into the upload form directly.

Videos are currently only accepted from Youtube and Vimeo and music can be pasted as a link that needs to point to an mp3 file on the Internet.

The usual options to follow other users are provided. The updates posted by followed users will then be displayed in the dashboard. There are several themes to choose from to change the layout. It is not as sophisticated as Twitter yet which becomes obvious when looking at the popular posts or users to follow. That might need some work. The concept on the other hand is user friendly and removes several of those dreaded limitations that Twitter imposes on its users.

Invites

Every new Yahoo Meme account currently gets seven friend invites. I want to hand out these invites to Ghacks users. What I would like to do is to give these to users who are willing to invite at least four other Ghacks members who would like to join (that’s three for them then and four for Ghacks members) so that everyone gets an invite in the end. If you want an invite reply with a comment. No need to add your email address in the text. You do need to add it in the email field (which is only visible to admins) to receive the invitations.

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The features that are added are manifold for a userscript / bookmarklet. PBtweet will display conversations in chain balloons which makes it much easier to follow them on Twitter. It will also remove redundant tweets automatically, add more messages automatically once the end of the page has been reached, insert new messages automatically at the top, expand shortened urls, offer picture previews and indicators and provide access to actions like translating and replying to messages.

The developers have created a demonstration video that is showcasing the functionality of PBTweet which is embedded below. It gives a great visual overview of the features offered by the bookmarklet / userscript.

Interested users find installation instructions and downloads at the developer’s website.

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The lightweight software program has been designed with lots of comfortable options to configure news sources and control the ticker on top of the screen. Several hotkeys are provided to pause (pause key) or disable (F11) the ticker. Other useful hotkeys are F8 to open the options, F12 to manage the feeds and Print Screen to visit the website of the current news item.

RSS Feeds can be added manually by pasting a single url into the feed manager. Multiple feeds can be imported from an opml file that most RSS feed readers can import and export feeds to. Only the user’s Twitter account can be added to the program as it is required to enter a username and password to display the Twitter messages. A lot of options are provided by the software that change the appearance of the feeds in the ticker. This ranges from transparency effects to fonts and the speed of the animation.

Feed Roller proves to be an interesting alternative for users who want to view news feeds without having to access another program to do so. The application uses less than 10 Megabytes of computer memory, is supplied as a portable version or installer and is compatible with most Microsoft operating systems.

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Freezly is a new web service that automates the process of finding giveaway messages on Twitter. It does that by searching for and indexing Twitter messages that contain specific keywords and probably also by following certain Twitter users who only post information about new giveaways in their tweets.

The giveaways that are displayed at Freezly are divided into a hottest category – which is also the default category that is displayed – and a just in category which sorts the giveaways by time of posting with the newest ones on top.

Each giveaway displays the title, description and number of tweets that it has received so far. The titles are links that point directly to the source of the giveaway. The search form at the top can be used to find specific giveaways, for example beta keys, hardware or company specific giveaways.

It would be nice if the website would offer categories that would automatically contain sorted giveaways to make it easier for the user to find giveaways of interest. Freezly should also think about offering an RSS Feed to make it easier to follow the latest giveaways that are posted on the site. Freezly via A New Morning.

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Curl is a tool that transfers data to or from a server. Curl supports HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS,  SCP,  SFTP,  TFTP,  DICT, TELNET,  LDAP  or  FILE protocols and works without user interaction. But the neat thing about curl is that it offers a ton of various tricks for the clever end user. One of those tricks is fetching and putting data to/from a server – like Google and Twitter.

What you’ll need

In order to achieve these tasks you will need to have installed both curl and html2text. Since I am showing you how to use these tools for command line tricks, there’s no need to figure up the GUI tools. So we will install both tools from the command line. To do so you need to open up your terminal and issue a command similar to:

sudo apt-get install curl html2text

You will be prompted for your sudo password and then asked to verify the installation. Hit ‘Y’ to continue on with the installation.

Once these two pieces of software are installed, it’s time to work some “magic”.

Searching Google

In order to do this you need to pipe one command through another. Piping is done with the help of the “|” character separating the commands. In this case you are going to pipe the curl command through the html2text command. What this will do is render the html fetched from Google into plain text.

In order to get curl to search a web site you will have to use a single argument with the command. The argument is:

-A

which instructs curl to send the user agent string to a web site so the site thinks it is actually a web browser doing the search. Crafty.

So the command looks like this:

curl -A Mozilla http://www.google.com/search?q='Jack Wallen' |html2text -width 80

Notice I use the single quotes. If you are searching for a single word this is not needed. If there is a space between two words, put them in single quotes. The results from this search would look like:

9. **** My Review of Jack Wallen's Post: �10 Reasons Why Linux Will ... ****
Windows 7 may be generating some positive buzz, but Jack Wallen remains
skeptical. In fact, he says it's only a matter of time before Linux takes
its ...
techxav.com/.../my-review-of-10-reasons-why-linux-will-triumph-over-
windows/ -Cached - Similar
10. **** Jack Wallen - news ****
Jack Wallen asks Why aren't schools adopting open source? and the answer
is simply exposure to open source. Getting thousands of students to call
and write ...
www.wikio.co.uk/news/Jack+Wallen -Cached - Similar

Because these results will fly by you might want to do one more trick with this command by sending it to a file instead. To do this we will use the “>” character and a file name like so:

curl -A Mozilla http://www.google.com/search?q='Jack Wallen' |html2text -width 80 > search

Once the search is done, issue the command less search and you will see the results of your search.

Update Twitter status

The same kind of trick is done with your twitter status. To do this you would issue a command like:

curl -u user:password -d status='Your tweet' http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

Where ‘Your tweet’ is the status update you want to enter.

Right after you issue that command a bunch of information will be returned. This information is your profile rendered in XML. I have yet to find a way to turn that off.

Final thoughts

The command line is an incredibly powerful tool. Imagine what you can do with these two examples. You could set up a cron job to update your status automatically. Or you could create a script to automatically gather data from Google searches. The possibilites are limitless.

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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.

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All of these realtime search engines have in common that they retrieve data from various sources upon the user’s request. The data is usually fetched from services such as Twitter or Friendfeed but also from blogs, social media sites and podcasts. Differences mainly exist in the way the results are presented to the user and the filtering options that are provided.

Feedmil

Feedmil offers a few features that the other realtime search engines do not offer. It comes with a slider that can be used to define the popularity range of the results. It is for example possible to concentrate on popular sources for the results only. The service can also filter results by type so that only results produced by a certain type of website or service are displayed. The types include blogs, micro-blogs, podcasts and social media among others.

Feedmil divides the search results page in two columns. The main column displays search results based on time and popularity while the sidebar column displays hot feeds related to the search term. The presentation of the results is excellent although they seem to be filtered before they appear on the page (we would have expected more Twitter results of the past four hours for a popular search term such as Google). It would also have been nice if the pages would not have to be reloaded when switching between the various news sources.

OneRiot

OneRiot looks almost like a conventional search engine. It mixes search results from various sources on the search results page. Sources used include blogs, Twitter, forums or Friendfeed and popular websites such as Userscripts or Digg. The results can be sorted by Pulse or Realtime with Pulse displaying popular results while realtime concentrates on fresh results. The results page looks a bit messy which can be mainly attributed to the avatar icons and the two different link colors that are used by OneRiot. The results look almost like Google Adsense ads which by default also use two different colors for their links.

Scoopler

Scoopler divides the results in three different columns with two showing results related to the query and one displaying the hot topics of the day. The main column displays the search results in realtime which becomes apparent as the posting time is usually less than five minutes ago. It will display results from a variety of sources including Twitter, Youtube and blogs. The main column gets updated that frequently for popular search terms that it is almost impossible to keep up.

The right column displays popular results and can be filtered to display only images, videos or links.

The auto updating page strongly emphasizes the realtime aspect of the search engine. It would have been nice if there was a way to pause the search results from being updated or to add certain search results to a personal area where they could be accessed at a later point in time.

Collecta

Collecta is the final search engine of this article. It will also display realtime search results and auto-update the page just like Scoopler. It comes with a pause function which is very handy as the results are displayed in rapid succession if a popular search term has been entered. The service uses four different categories that can be filtered in the search options: Articles, Comments, Pictures and Updates.

The results are displayed in the main column of the page. A little bit irritating is the orientation of the page as it is aligned on the left side of the screen and not centered. A click on a result will display the full message in the right column from where it can be viewed and processed further.

A way to add multiple results to the right column would have been nice. As would have been if the source of the result would have been displayed in the main column.

Verdict

Realtime search engines have one problem: They can either display all results which are impossible to keep up with for popular search terms or display only popular results from sources that they have picked (e.g. Twitter accounts with a follower count of at least 200). Both options will dissatisfy some users. It would have been nice if the services would offer a better customization of the results by offering the user to add individual sources to them. Letting a user add Twitter, Youtube or Friendfeed users and channels, blogs and websites or social media sites could be interesting for many users as this would take the RSS reader concept to the next level by mixing it up with other sources that have been handpicked by the user.

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It has been created by the same developer who created Tweet My PC, a software program that would accept commands from a Twitter account to manage the computer system automatically.

Remind Me About is different as it comes as a service offered by the software developer and also as a version that can be installed on a server to run it more privately. It basically works the following way: The user sends a message to a Twitter account that has been created to handle the reminders. These reminders will be stored in a database on the web server running the scripts. Another php script will be checking the database frequently for reminders that are ready to be send out. If those reminders are found they are send out using the same Twitter account.

The php scripts have not been published yet officially by the developer but are going to be released soon. They do require a web server that supports php, MySQL databases and Cron jobs. Running the script on a web server can make sense for several reasons including Twitter Api limitations but also privacy or security related concerns.

The script will be published by the developer soon. As of now only the reminder service setup by the developer is available. No Twitter information (other than following and being followed by the Twitter user the service is running on) are required to use it though.

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All of this comes in a tiny panel applet that is simple to install and simple to use. How easy is Deskbar to install and use? Let’s find out…

Getting and installing

The Deskbar applet will be found in your distributions’ repositories most likely. So all you will have to do is either fire up your Add/Remove software utility or a terminal window. If you opt for the GUI tool you will install like so:

1. Open up the Add/Remove software utility (such as Synaptic or gpk-application).
2. Search for “deskbar-applet” (no quotes).
3. Select the resulting deskbar-applet entry.
4. Click Apply to install.

If you opt for the command line you can open up a terminal window and enter a command such as:

apt-get install deskbar-applet

or

yum install deskbar-applet

You will see no visible sign that Deskbar has been installed because you hav to add it to your panel.

Adding Deskbar to your panel

Figure 1

If you right click your GNOME panel a menu will open contining the entry “Add To Panel”. Selecting that menu entry will open up the Add To Panel window where you will select the Deskbar entry and click the Add button. When the Deskbar applet is added you will see the icon as shown in Figure 1 (the panel icon on the far right.)

Configuring Deskbar

There isn’t too many options to configure with Deskbar. The most important options will be to enable the various plugins you want to use as well as add your Twitter username/password (should you want to use Deskbar to post to Twitter.) To do this right click the Deskbar icon and select Preferences from the menu.

Figure 2

From the Preferences window you will see three tabs and a few buttons (see Figure 2). The first thing you will want to do is scroll through the list of Extensions and decide if you want to enable or disable any of them. To enable an Extension just click the checkbox so the checkmark appears. To disable an Extension click the checkbox so the checkmark disappears.

You can also move an Extension up or down the list so that a particular extension gets priority for searching or action. And finally you can configure an extension by selecting it and click the More button. For example, in order to configure your username/password for Twitter you will need to select the Twitter extension and press the More button. In this new window you will enter the credentials for your Twitter account. The More button only appears on Extensions that have configurable options.

Using Deskbar

Figure 3

This is where it gets simple. Say I want to search my machine for the sting “linux”. Click on the Desbar icon and the text area will open up for you to enter your search. As you enter your search string the Deskbar window will expand to reveal various options (see Figure 3.)

As you can see there are a number of options available:

• I can execute a command
• Search for “linux” with Beagle
• Lookup “linux” in my dictionary
• Post “linux” on Twitter.

Depending upon what Extensions I have enabled there will be more or less entries.

Final thoughts

Deskbar will quickly become your best friend on your GNOME desktop. Making use of this handy app will help to make your desktop life much more effient and simpler. My only hopes is that other desktops (such as Enlightenment) will follow suit and create simillar apps.

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TwInBox, which was formerly known as OutTwit, is compatible with Microsoft Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 running on Windows XP or Windows Vista with the likelihood that it will also work in Windows 7. Installation is a breeze. All that needs to be done is to run the setup (while Outlook is closed). The TwInbox add-on will automatically be displayed in the Microsoft Outlook toolbar on the next start of the email client.

The first thing a new user needs to do is to get into the options and enter the Twitter username and password to link these to the Outlook account. A new Outlook folder for Twitter messages has to be created in the same interface as well. There are other options like displaying notifications whenever a new Twitter message arrives.

The Outlook add-on allows a user to perform common Twitter tasks like updating the Twitter status, receiving new messages or replying to messages. There are also quite a few options that could be very interesting for some Twitter users including the ability to handle Twitter messages like emails with the option to archive, manage, group and search them. There are also options to track keywords, upload and post pictures and files that have been send to Outlook, automatically sort messages in sender folders or to assign custom folders and categories to new messages. There is also a graph available that is displaying Twitter usage statistics.

TwInbox (via Cybernetnews) can be downloaded directly from the developer’s homepage.

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The very same page contains additional options to shorten the message and post it to Twitter or Facebook. Both of these options require a Stumbleupon account which gets linked to the Twitter and Facebook account.

Su.pr provides two interesting options that can make it interesting to users. The first is that every url that gets shortened gets also submitted to Stumbleupon. That option might be especially interesting to webmasters who post their new blog posts or websites to Twitter or Facebook anyway. This way they can post it to Stumbleupon as well which usually generates some extra traffic. Some webmasters have experienced hundreds of additional visitors coming from Stumbleupon using this method. A Wordpress plugin has been provided by Stumbleupon to automate the process.

It is furthermore possible to move the shortened url from su.pr to the domain the blog is hosted on so that links will point to that domain instead.

The second interesting aspect of Su.pr is an extensive statistics section which will give the user traffic details about the url that has been posted. This includes clicks, referrers, re-tweets and reviews. A last option that sounds interesting is the ability to schedule posts.

Su.pr is a convenient URL shortening service with some interesting features. It could become very popular with webmasters who post their articles and websites to Twitter and Facebook. Their main benefits are the statistics that are provided and that the url gets posted to Stumbleupon as well.

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• Publish RSS News Feeds On Twitter (6)
• Post to multiple accounts with Gwibber (0)

#5 TwitterHolic

The name of this says addiction all over it. Can you guess which part? Yep, you got it, it’s Twitter! As with many Twitter addons, this is one of those “I’m really bored and feel like looking at some stats” addons. It’s still really cool to use and sadly a little competitive, but we’re not quite off the MySpace Top Friends kick so we deserve a little bit of competition in Twitter. It’s human nature, right? TwitterHolic shows users their rank by the number of followers they have and how they rank based on where they live. It also has a line graph showing how many followers a specific user has had in the past and how many are predicted for the user in he future.

#4 Twellow

There are two ways to follow people on Twitter. There is the noob way which is to find a popular twitterer and follow all their followers or they can find people to follow based on their interests. The latter is more fun because instead of seeing a bunch of “my socks smell today, I should change them” or “CHECK OUT THIS AWESOME SPAM SITE ITS GREAT,” tweets users can actually see tweets they care about. Twellow allow users to browse other twitters based on their interests. Twellow only allows users to put themselves into 10 categories which prevents people from stuffing themselves in every category in a sad attempt to get followers. The site itself could use a redesign, but it’s a great tool.

#3 TweetDeck

TweetDeck is great for those who follow a lot of people or the few people they do follow tweet a lot. This application allows users to sort twitters into different groups making Tweets much easier to read. Many people use Twirl instead, but I personally prefer TweetDeck.

#2 TwitThis

This is a tool that more blogger need to use. This allows bloggers to put a little button by each blog post. When a twitter user finds and likes a blog post, they can click the button which will automatically tweet the blog post title and url from the twitterers account. This is similar to Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious icons that are often found on blogs.

#1 TwitterFox

Those addicted to both Firefox and Twitter can save time and be addicted to both at once. TwitterFox makes this possible by allowing Firefox users to make tweets right from their browser. This is great for people who are browsing their favorite forum or editing a blog post and feel the sudden urge to tweet something. Instead of switching tabs, all TwitterFox users need to do is enter their tweet up into the little TwitterFox box that stays in their browser toolbar. Easy peesy!

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