The Many Uses of Twitter: Part 2

So, I've been telling Hunee I'd write this sequel for a week or so now, but I've been struggling over what deserves to be covered. I'm gonna lay out a few more tools for enhancing your Twitter experience.

Thanks to Twitter's open API, lots of great people have made lots of great tools for it. In part one I mentioned TweetStats, and the creator of that wonderful site, also has an excellent way to clear out your DM inbox. Make sure you show some love and follow @dacort for his excellent contributions to the way we use twitter.

Twitter Karma and My Tweeple are both excellent sites for managing your followers/followees. As you gain more followers, it becoms difficult to do this on the twitter site. These sites make it much easier.

Tweetbar is a cool little plug-in for FireFox that lets you tweet right from the address bar in your browser.

Lastly, take a look at Twittervision. It's a very cool little play thing that can show you where in the world all your favorite Twits are tweeting from.

One more thing. Do you have a good idea for a Twitter App? You can learn more about working with the Twitter API here.

I hope you've learned some things about Twitter today. Please, if I have left out any of your favorite tools or apps in this series of posts, let Hunee know, and maybe I'll be back ;)

Much Love.
Jack Lhasa
I Listen.
I Travel.

Jack Lhasa is a travel writer, currently in Southern California. He maintains several blogs, a dozen or more social networks, and writes for cash too. Damn, he's everywhere. ;)

The Many Uses of Twitter

When I offered to write this blog for my sister, Hunee, I don't think I knew what I was getting into.  "The Many Uses of Twitter."  I could write a whole wiki on this.  Let's start with some basics, then I'll leave you with some teasers of the more advanced features.  

If you don't already know(you need to keep up!), Twitter is a microblogging community.  What this means is that you are given a very small space(140 characters) to say what ever you want and the community and your friends can respond to it.  This also makes twitter a great place for conversation, because no one can get too long winded in an answer.  It forces a give and take style of communication, which is very healthy.  

Now if we look a little beyond the blogging aspect and the conversation aspect, you can begin to see so much more.  Because of the large community, it's a great place to poll people for answers, or to seek help if you are in a dilemma.  I've gotten just over 600 followers, so if I'm doing some research, as I was the other night, answers start coming fast.  I sent out a short survey:  "What is your blog about?"  Within seconds answers started coming to me.  I ended up with two pages of answers from people that range from close friends, to people that I had never really spoken to.  Needless to say that was more than I expected and I got a very good idea of what the casual blogger writes about.

If we want to take Twitter a step further, we can use other websites and applications to enhance it via it's open API.  Here's a short bullet list of some of the communities favorites:

• Twitterfeed - Let's you plug any RSS feed in, and then it autoposts these entries every so often.
• Twitpic - Allows you to share photos with your Twitter friends.
• Tweeterboard - Shows you who's most active in the Twitterverse.
• Tweetstats - Allows you to see personal statics about your usage.
• Twitterfone - Still very beta, but allows you to call an 800 number and talk, it records the message and then attempts to transcribe it as a tweet.

There are literally hundreds of programs like this that can help you enhance your twitter experience and build upon the way you use this very simple site.

You can post tweets via the web interface, IM, SMS, and through many third party client programs.  Twitter is very versatile, and simplistic in use, making it easy for anyone to use.  

Twitter can be used to promote things.  Take, for example, my current writing project, Twitter Travels, funded for the last 2 months almost entirely by Twitter users(or Twits).  Many people use Twitter for blog and project promotion, but to do only that would be limiting yourself greatly. 

On another note, Twits are trying very hard to make this online community a real life community.  Check out Greg Barnett's TweetUpLA, which I was privilegedenough to be able to attend.  It was a great success and he's going to be doing another in October.  

So as I said, I could go on about this forever, but I think this is enough for one blog post.  Maybe in a few days Hunee will let me do a sequel to cover all the many things I could not here.

Cheers,

Jack Lhasa

Jack Lhasa is a traveling writer, currently traveling the state of California.  He writes for Twitter Travels, as well as Loki Listens.  Jack Lhasa does many, many guest blogs and public appearances(Like I'm a superstar, right?).  Jack is always willing to meet you for a drink or lunch if you're close by.