Having recently joined the Twitter Bandwagon I was happy to see all the tools and software people have already developed to interact with the service. From Twitter trends to inserting ‘currently listening to’, let me show you five of my favorite tools to help you use Twitter more productively than ever.
It’s also a good idea to look at Mark’s Twitter Tools Apps & Bots article as well as Jason’s Twitter tools article.
Twhirl is an Adobe Air application which we have already mentioned here on Make Use Of, and I love it so much I have only used the web interface about twice.
I’m a sucker for data. I love analyzing it, graphing it, inputting it: everything. I also love web trends and their ability to go viral. This is why I started using Trendrr, a data tracking, comparison, and sharing site. It’s graphs and data, a stat geek’s dream.
Trendrr allows you to track 20 different data sets from a number of popular sites around the web. You can track social networking stats like Myspace profile views or Twitter user stats, sales information like Amazon sales rankings and eBay auctions or maybe you just want to track various stock tickers. Currently there are 20 different data sources for you to choose from, with more being added as the site grows.
Google Trends is an interesting and entertaining analytical tool that shows level of people’s interest in particular topics over some time period. If you want to know popularity for certain topics over the last year or month this is the tool to use.
Google is largest and most widely used search engine on the web with more then 2.5 billion searches conducted every month (more here). By selecting portion of this data and analyzing how many times ‘terms you entered’ have been searched relative to the total number of searches on Google over the days, it generates trends. These trends are based on the real searches conducted by people hence they show trends of community towards the topic. Remember recent buzz regarding US ports takeover? See the trend here
While every web publisher and website owner knows about it unfortunately very few users do. Alexa has some useful user oriented services that I personally use on a daily basis so I decided to review it.
Mostly Alexa used for quick checkup on popularity of a website. It provides users with such info as traffic details (rank of the website out of all active websites), incoming links(other websites linking to it), related links(related websites) and owner’s contact info. It can also be used to check on site’s credibility by looking at the number and relevance of incoming links and traffic rank. To get some idea check out alexa info on wikipedia.org here. The easiest way to benefit from this service, is by installing ‘Alexa Toolbar‘, which provides you with real-time info about websites as you visit them.
