Top 5 Twitter Apps

I confess that I found Twitter rather boring when I first started using it. In fact, I found it so dull that I stopped after a few days and never bothered with it again until I redesigned my personal blog. I decided to add a Twitter feed widget to the new layout and from then on I was a good deal more interested. To be honest, I'm probably more interested than I should be, as I blog less frequently since becoming a more avid user of Twitter. In the process of learning more about Tweeting, however, I started to get rather annoyed with the original Twitter interface; it was too difficult to manage tweets from other twitterers and a bit annoying trying to find new people to follow. So I started to search for apps which were simple to use and would make tweeting much easier and a lot more fun. The following are my favorite Top 5 Twitter Applications.

1. TweetDeck

This is such an awesome application I cannot say enough about how wonderful it is. It runs on all platforms and I use it on a Mac. You will need to download Adobe Air if you don't already have it, just so you're aware of that beforehand; it's free and so is TweetDeck. Quite simply put, TweetDeck is a way to organize all of your tweets, @replies and direct messages. (Actually it does more than this, but that's what I'm going to focus on for the purposes of this article.)

• So, you load it up and then create groups in which you can select whose tweets filter into it. You can even choose to totally filter out tweets from people you aren't really wanting to follow, but feel badly about un-following, if you know what I mean. (Oh, come on, some people tweet every five seconds! Who has time to read all of that??)

• You can also have a column which shows all the @replies you get. This is brilliant, as I didn't see loads of mine when I first starting using Twitter, because I expected them to show up in my normal Tweeting column. With TweetDeck they show up automatically.

• You can also search for people with TweetDeck. It's quite nice because when you click on the person's profile it shows you a new column with that person's stats and bio, which makes it very easy to determine whether or not you want to follow them.

• TweetDeck also makes it very easy to reply to any tweets, and will automatically enter names and retweets and hashtags for you. Didn't I tell you this was a fabulous program?

2. Twimailer

First generation Twits used Topify for this, but Topify isn't available without an invitation so I went with Twimailer -- and I'm perfectly happy with it. It sends you an email when someone follows you, and that email tells you: their name, bio, location, how many people are following them, how people they are following, a list of recent tweets and it gives you an option to follow, block or report them as spam. Pretty nifty, eh?

3. Twitter Advanced Search

This is part of Twitter itself and works much, much better than the regular search box you see on your profile page. When you go advanced you can search by locality, hashtag, date, from a specific person, to a specific person and more. You can even search by positive or negative attitude, which is kind of amazing when you think about it! Nothing to download here, but do bookmark it.

4. Twello

This program is so cool. It is, essentially, the Twitter Yellow Pages. You can search for Tweeps the same way you you'd search the internet yellow pages. Search by categories of work, location, interests -- almost anything, really. List yourself by your occupation and let others find you quickly. Excellent marketing tool for business Tweeps. Brilliant for networking.

5. Twitter Local

This is another fantastic Twitter application. Just type in a location and you get a list of tweets from there in small window which can be used alongside of TweetDeck. Very good method of searching out people in a certain town, city or country.