There are hundreds of Twitter applications on the market, many of which have been covered previously on this blog, including a number of clients, such as TweetDeck and Posty. With the Twitter ecosystem continuing to grow, as evidenced by last night's post on SocialToo, I wanted to touch upon a few that I use, and that I feel are unique and useful. This post highlights fifteen different Twitter tools that I believe would be excellent additions for your Twitter toolbox.1) Twuffer
Twuffer is a simple, useful utility that allows you to schedule pre-written messages for posting at a later date in time. You could use this tool for setting up reminders for upcoming birthdays, meetings, appointments, paying bills and so forth.
2) Twistory
Twistory brings Twitter and Google Calender together for a marriage made in heaven. Simply add your Twitter backlog feed into any of your favorite calendar applications, and you have a perfect date/time synced Twitter diary. This is a great tool for efficiently creating one central, what I call, visual productivity hub for your Twitter data. This application makes Twitter an ideal application for a digital Rolodex.
3) Tweetake
Tweetake only has one purpose, and that is to provide you with a backup of all your Twitter data. Data is backed up via a .CSV file. It's good to periodically download a local copy of all your Twitter followers, tweets etc. If Twitter ever suffers a catastrophic technical failure, it can not recover from, you will be isolated from any data loss.
4) TweetStats
TweetStats is nice metrics tool that gives you graphed visual statistics for data, such as posting interface used, tweets per day, tweets per hour, tweet timelines and reply statistics. You can also see the latest trends being talked about on Twitter.
5) TwitterCounter
Twitter Counter gives you a graphed snapshot of your daily follower counts. You can track daily growth or lack of it, and it will also give you an estimated follower count for the oncoming month, based on it's data. The other notable feature they provide is a Twitter follower count chicklet. It's identical looking to the Feedburner counter chicklet, whereas this one displays your Twitter follower count.
6) TweetCloud
Everyone loves a good word cloud. Tweetclouds allows you to create a word cloud from a public Twitter users stream, or from any words of text you freely input.
7) TwitterLocal
This is a great tool for finding and filtering out public tweets within a certain geographical area. You can search for activity by city, state, or postal code. An RSS or XML Feed is generated for your search results. Add the RSS feed into Google Reader, and track local activity there. They also offer an Adobe Air App, so you can track tweets from your desktop.
8) Tweetburner
Tweetburner is a URL shortening service. It allows you to create short URLs, share them with your friends over Twitter, and view click statistics for your shortened URLs.
9) TwitStamp
TwitStamp allows you to create badges to display your most recent Twitter statuses on your blog or website. You can also create "twitcard"badges, as pictured below. These are clean and simple, and should compliment any website or sidebar nicely.
10) Qwitter
Qwitter is a helpful and creative way for using Twitter, basically as a support journal and tool for smokers looking to kick the habit. Each time you smoke, send Qwitter the number of cigarettes you just smoked by posting an update to Twitter. Every day, Qwitter adds together all the updates you sent that day and adds them to your progress graph. Qwitter can also connect you with other Twitter users who have or are going through the same experiences as you.
11) Twinfluence
Measure the combined influence of you and your followers. This could be a great boost to your ego. How influential is your Twitter social net?
12) Less Friends
Do all the people you follow on Twitter follow you back? This tool will help you find out. It may be time to do some pruning.
13) Twitturls
Twitturls shows you the most popular links being talked about on Twitter, in real time. Content is pulled from public Twitter streams, ranked and listed on the site. You can see what the current buzz is all about.
14) iTweet
iTweet is an alternative Twitter interface for use with both your web browser and your iPhone. The web based interface has a clean user interface, and comes loaded with pretty much everything you need. It has built-in auto-refresh, search and hashtags, full follow, block, notifications user profile features and more.
15) Twidroid
Twidroid, I thought deserved a worthy mention, because it's the first full-featured Twitter client available for Android mobile phones. It was released only a few weeks ago, and is currently available for download in the Android market.
Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.