all hail the shag

Almost every day it seems a new service or mashup for Twitter comes out. Some will stick, others won’t. That’s the great thing about the internet is that everyone gets to try!  Twitter has reached a point of critical mass now where mining the data and the trends around what’s happening on Twitter is as valuable as the messages themselves. I use twitter for both business and personal pursuits, and have tried a ton of the apps and services that have come out. Here are my favorites;

• Twhirl – AIR based desktop client – there are lots of other desktop clients but I like this the best because it includes URL shortening, retweet, finding users, etc. Its the most feature rich. Tweetdeck is cool too but is short on some of the key features. Since I like to have at least two accounts open at once (arinewman and filtrbox)
• search.twitter.com – a great way to find mentions of anything specific in the twitter stream. At Filtrbox, we’ve taken the twitter search API and integrated it into our media monitoring service so you can set up the searches once and receive daily emails with any new mentions from ANY twitter user (as long as their stream is public). You can also turn these searches into RSS feeds in Filtrbox, but I digress…
• Tweetie – the best iPhone client I’ve used so far. I’ve tried twittelator, twitterific and others and found this new entrant to be superior for a few reasons. Its fast, stable, simple, supports location/photos, multiple accounts, following others, trending topics and saved searches. Totally worth the 3 bucks. Here’s one of the menus… 

 

• Monitter – a cool web UI for search.twitter.com – its pretty basic but enables you to set up a bunch of searches and see the stream of tweets. I don’t use it that much because its an app that requires constant attention, which is impossible. Its on this list because its a great demonstration of the value of the twitter search API.
• Filtrbox – (disclaimer – I’m a founder and President) – a powerful and cost-effective online news and media monitoring service that does keyword-based persistent search across online news, the blogosphere and social networks (twitter and Friendfeed). If you want to track brands, companies, people, hot trends, or any specific topic across all types of online media, Filtrbox is awesome. It supports twitter via the search API, and you can receive emails every day listing all of the mentions on Twitter. You can also post articles the system finds directly to Twitter from the web dashboard. Rather than checking search.twitter.com all the time or running manual searches, its sort of a set-it-and-forget-it thing…if there’s a mention, you’ll see it. With its trending and coverage reports, you can keep track of who on twitter is talking about things you care about. 
• MediaOnTwitter  - a wiki, and overall good resource that identifies what media outlets are on twitter and how to find them. Check out the US page to get an idea…http://mediaontwitter.pbwiki.com/United States

There are a ton of others out there, but these are my faves and what I rely on. Let me know what I missed or what you like better!

filtrbox, info overload, iphone, tech bits filtrbox, iphone, social media, tweetie, twhirl, twitter