Week 2, Extra Thing: Twitter, extended!

This week's Extra Thing is really several things - third party Twitter applications and clients. These tools or add-ons complement your Twitter account and add extra functionalities which can be extremely useful. Here are a few handy ones, but there are many more out there!

Applications

• Twitterfeed - sends a tweet every time you publish a new blog post.
• Future Tweets - allows you to schedule tweets to go out at a specified date and time.
• The Archivist - creates graphs about tweet volume over time, top users, top words used etc. Despite the name it doesn't create a full archive of your tweets.
• Twapperkeeper - creates archives of tweets. You can create 2 free archives, if you want more you'll either have to delete one or pay.
• Twittermail - update your Twitter status by email.
• Bit.ly - not really a Twitter application, but if you paste a URL into the box, it pops out a shortened URL such as this one - http://bit.ly/jYjYDS - which is a short URL for this blog. If you use shortened URLs in your tweets then it saves on precious characters!

Clients
Twitter clients make it easier to manage more than one Twitter account at once. (Great when you have a library and a personal account!) Most also allow you to schedule tweets, and automatically shorten URLs

• Hootsuite - Comes in browser and mobile versions. Multiple tabs make it easy to keep track of several Twitter accounts at once (and Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and a few other social media sites). Can also have multiple contributers to accounts without sharing passwords - could be useful for library tweeting teams!
• Seesmic - comes in browser, desktop and mobile versions. As with Hootsuite you can add other social media accounts besides Twitter.
• Tweetdeck - desktop and mobile client (browser version for Chrome only - but with a limited beta testing version for other browsers). This client is now owned by Twitter, so if you want the official endorsed platform, give this a try!

Try out one or two of these, or google "twitter apps" and see what else you can find!

by IconEden on IconFinder.com