TwiTip has a great post about 10 Ways To Be Useful on Twitter. This is a nice summary of advice ranging from “Be you” to “The Art of the Retweet” and “Have a Tool Box”:
Everyone has something to bring to the table that’s engaging, fun, and can help the conversation. So Be Useful, and get to it.
Twanalyst.com gives you a free Twitter personality test. As always, take it with a grain of salt but it’s a fun thing.
I have done it and got this back:
Personality: renowned inquisitive cautious
Style: chatty academic
BOFFIN
I disagree with boffin but the rest seems pretty accurate. You also get some tweeting tips, mine were:
Your tweeting is already tip-top! No improvements needed – but check back here every so often to make sure your reputation is being maintained!
I notice that when they calculate tweets/day they simply take from when you signed up until current date. In my case that does not make sense. I joined in April 2007 but started tweeting seriously in January 2009.
Twitip has a post about 11 Useful Twitter Tools That Don’t Require Your Password. Personally I avoid services that require my password, this is an excellent list. I already use some of them and will look at some of the others.
I use Gmail, I like the labels instead of folders plus their strong spam filter. Google has introduced some useful extra features in the Labs section under settings.
ReadWriteWeb has a post about Five Fabulous Gmail Gadgets You Won’t Find in Labs. One of them is the Twitter Gadget:
The Twitter Gadget is a recent favorite of ours. Once installed, it provides a box where you can update your status, check your friends’ timeline, read your replies and direct messages, and view your favorites.
I have not tried the Twitter Gadget, I use TweetDeck – Twitter on your desktop.
Mashable has a review of a new Twitter desktop application Seesmic Desktop: A Threat to TweetDeck? It sounds promising but also very similar to TweetDeck (which I use).
I agree with this conclusion by Mashable:
In the never ending battle for your desktop, the real winner isn’t Seesmic or TweetDeck, but rather you, the end user.
TechCrunch posted that Seesmic Unveils A Formidable New Twitter Client To Rival Tweetdeck: Seesmic Desktop.
Read more:
TweetDeck – Twitter on your desktop
Mashable writes about 15 Fascinating Ways to Track Twitter Trends. It’s a great list of applications that help you track trends on Twitter.
TwiTip writes about Welcome to the Hive Mind; Learn How to Search Twitter which is a guide to Twitter Advanced Search.
TwiTip has a post about Why I Suck At Twitter: Confession Of A Failure.
Why I failed to do what every nowise is doing with twitter now days. What I have learned from my mistakes and how you can learn from my experience.
Each point is expanded in the post above, this is the list:
• I Didn’t Give It My Personal Touch
• I Never Leverage My Other Social Networking Profiles
• I Followed The Bigshots Only
• I Was Self-Focused
• I Never Reciprocate
• I Annoy My Followers
Under “I Never Reciprocate” it says Follow everyone that follows you but I disagree. I follow back if they connect, my focus is on conversations. In the same way I let people that I follow decide on their own whether to follow me back or not.
WriteToDone has a post about How to Make Your Site go Viral on Twitter which is about using Twitter to build site traffic.
CopyBlogger writes about How Twitter Makes You A Better Writer. The 140 character limit in Twitter forces you to be creative.
Jenn Shallvey writes about Meaningful twitter.
More about Twitter:
The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Heroes on Twitter
The Ultimate Guide for Everything Twitter
Twimages creates an image of your connections, the ones you have conversations with.
A Twimage is a twitter user’s conversation visualiser. Basically, the people on twitter you have conversations with (via @replies) are the conversationalists.
Twimages fetches images from Twitter profiles and creates a “gallery” where image size is roughly proportional to the volume of conversation with each person shown. It also list your “Conversationalists” (I currently have 69 of them).
I found an interesting site through ReadWriteWeb, it is Top Twitter Friends at Mailana. It helps you answr questions like:
Who do you talk to most often on Twitter?
Who are your closest friends?
What does your social network look like?
You can enter your own Twitter username or someone elses. The image they produce is great, you can click to see the profile for those you talk to.
