Realizing this, a few great applications have come out of the woodwork to make Twitter into a better way to have and follow a conversation. They thread tweets, track replies, and make sure you can understand the whole dialog, rather than just one small and insignificant part.

Here are three of the best ways to keep conversations under control on Twitter:

Twitoaster

Twitoaster is probably the easiest of the bunch to get started with – all you have to do is follow @twitoaster on Twitter. Then, Twitoaster goes to work for you. Every time someone responds to one of your tweets, the conversation is threaded on Twitoaster. You can see the number of replies (a number that’s frequently updated) to a given tweet, as well as see what people said. You can also log in to your Twitter account on Twitoaster, which lets you reply to your replies right from within the conversation.

Twitoaster also offers a couple of cool features – it tracks the number of replies a given account gets, as well as how you rank among Twitoaster users. It’s a full-featured way to track replies, as well as see who’s responding to your tweets.

Tweetree

Tweetree is really two great services in one – it creates conversation threads for replies, and it’s a total overhaul and improvement on the Twitter interface. First, the interface. Tweetree allows you to pull in external content – videos, images, and the like – and experience it directly within Tweetree. It also takes all shortened URLs, and shows where they actually go – a nice touch to avoid RickRolls and the like.

The conversation threading, too, is a great feature of Tweetree. It brings in all conversations you’re a part of on Twitter (even showing the tweets you replied to), and puts them in tree form, nesting the replies throughout the conversation. If you’re getting the “oh, how cool” tweets a lot, or replied about something you can’t remember for the life of you, Tweetree keeps track of it for you. You can do everything in Tweetree you’d want to do in Twitter, and actually a whole lot more.

ThreadedTweets

ThreadedTweets rocks the world of real-time conversation threading. You can sign up for ThreadedTweets without having to give your Twitter password, because it uses Twitter’s OAuth system to authenticate, rather than asking for your password. Once you’re signed in, you’ll get real-time monitoring of all the replies to your tweets, which are threaded into a conversation for you.

ThreadedTweets also keeps a list of Popular conversations, which you can read and view easily. Every conversation has a permalink, which makes it even easier to keep monitored and updated. There’s even an embeddable widget for tracking a conversation on another site – this makes ThreadedTweets both a conversation tool and a real-time search, which is a great combination.

One of Twitter’s best features is its ability to create quick, simple conversations. Twitter itself does a poor job of tracking them and keeping conversations intact, but these four applications do it incredibly well. What’s your favorite way to keep track of your conversations on Twitter?

Oh and make sure to follow MakeUseOf on Twitter as well. We are now going to start using for distributing beta invites to publicly closed websites and giveaway license keys to commercial software (when available).

Photo: respres

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Don’t worry though. Gmail now has you covered on that front also. The Gmail Labs team has just released a new widget for just this purpose. This handy widget lets you convert email conversations to text documents that can be downloaded and saved to your PC in different formats.

To enable this new functionality, login to Gmail and click on “settings”. Now go to the “Labs” sub-tab and scroll down till you see the “Create a Document” widget. Enable it and save the settings.

Now, to make use of this great new function, open the email conversation that you’ve been dreading to make notes from. On the right hand side of the page, you should see a link titled “Create a Document” just above the sponsored links. Click on this link, a new window will open, Gmail will place the full text of the email conversation in a new Google Docs document and put you in charge.

One nice touch that the engineers at Google have put in is that the email signatures and quoted text is not a part of this conversion. So, that’s one less headache for you while cleaning up the document for sharing with your colleagues.

Once the document is in Google Docs, its just a matter of a couple of clicks and you can easily edit out whatever you want and then save or share the document with your peers for a review. Making a task list or a TODO from an email has never been this easy.

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(1) PDF@koolwire.com

Koolwire is a simple, no-login required PDF conversion service. Simply send the document (DOC, PPT, XLS, JPEG, GIF, RTF, and TXT.) to ‘PDF@koolwire.com’ and shortly after get it back as PDF.

(2) WHATEVER@drop.io

Drop.io lets you create so called drops and use them as private file storage boxes. Drops can be shared with others on a variety of access levels (viewer, contributor, etc.). Best of all, each drop gets its own email address, so everything emailed to that email will be added to the drop.

(3) DOC@scanr.com / WB@scanr.com

If you sign-up with Scanr you will be able to use your mobile or digicam as a scanner. You can send it a blurry capture of your notes and you will get back a cleaned up, decrapified and even OCRed PDF version of your image. (Register before)

(4) GO@9cays.com

9cays is a very cool service that allows you start group email conversations by emailing your thread to GO@9cays.com. Add participants by adding them to ‘Cc:’ field. Best part about it, all exchanged messages (and attachments) will be nicely embedded on a custom webpage. (Register before)

(5) DUTEOUS@your_username.iwantsandy.com

An invisible personal assistant that sits in your email program. You can ask it to remind you about something, or even help you organize meetings with friends. (Register before)

• Schedule Reminders: Hey Sandy, remind me to do my laundry on Sunday. or Sandy, remember my haircut on 11/4 3-4pm.
• Group Reminders: Just add others to ‘Cc:’ and reminders will be sent to everyone on the list.
• Daily Digest: Morning email with everything you’ve got going for the day.
• and more.

Got any another useful email contact? Share it in comments

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