10 Things You Didn’t Know About Twitter

Want to improve your Twitter Ninja skills?  Want to impress all your friends with your twitter abilities? Ever wondered how some of the Twitter elite do some of the crazy things they do with twitter? Whether you are new to twitter, or have been using twitter for a while, you are guaranteed to learn something new and cool in the next 5 minutes.

1. Twitter Tracking

One of the best things about twitter is it gives you the ability to get off of the computer, take your cell phone, and still feel connected to the world.  While all of you probably know how you can track your friends online, how do you track concepts?  When you are at a conference, how do you track what people are saying about you?  I recently launched twitterdevs.com and I was curious if people were talking about it on twitter!  Bring on twitter tracking!

Simply add TweetTrak as a friend, then text tweettrak with the keyword “track” and pick something to track.  so for example:

d tweettrak track twitterdevs

TwitterTrak will now send me a text message every time someone texts something with “twitterdevs” in the message.  How do you get rid of it?  Simply use the “untrack” keyword.  Another great example would be if you’re in an airport and wondering who uses twitter at the airport?  Just type “d tweettrak track Atlanta Airport”.  Try it next time you are looking to see what everyone else is doing out there.  It’s a blast.

2. Digsby Makes Staying on Top of Everything Easy

One of the biggest reasons that I hear people don’t want to try twitter is "I already way too many Social Networks to keep up with, tied together with my email, IM applications, adding twitter is way too much effort".  With Digsby you get all your social networks including twitter under one application.  You can easily create new twitter messages by clicking the twitter icon, or replying to your friends twitter streams.

3. Twitter Search

Have you ever wondered what people are saying about a specific topic on twitter?  Ever wondered how people at conferences know what’s going happening on twitter so easily?  Twitter Search makes it possible for you to easily type in a few keywords, and see what people are saying about a certain topic.  In the screen shot below I was looking for what people were saying about the Blackberry Storm.  I ended up finding some exclusive pictures of the new phone coming in October!

4. Share Pictures with your tweets

Have you been wanting to add pictures to your twitter stream?  twitpic is the tool you want to use.  Simply sign up to twitpic, and start uploading pictures instantly.  Once you upload a picture, twitpic will post a new message to your twitter feed, so you don’t have to.  Want to send pictures to twitpic through your cell phone?  Not a problem!  twitpic supports mobile devices quite easily in a few different ways.  There’s a bunch more features as well like tagging, geotagging, rss feeds, and a Google map mashup.

5. Track Your Packages

Wondering when you are going to get your package?  Like being able to check the web site but wish something would just let you know when the package changes status or location?  Just send a quick direct message to trackthis and trackthis sends you a direct message any time your package location changes. Trackthis currently supports FedEx, UPS, USPS and DHL tracking codes.  Just tweet your cracking code and package name, and that’s it!

6. Post Your Blog Updates to Twitter

Do you have a blog or RSS Stream that you wish could automatically be published to your twitter stream?  Then Twitterfeed is your answer.  The Twitterfeed server will check your blog’s feed at a specified interval and post any new items to your twitter account. You just sit back and relax!

7. Thread your Twitter Conversations

Tweader is a new way to view twitter conversations. Long gone are the days of going through all of a tweet’s @replies to get a grasp of the conversation. All you have to do now is enter the tweet’s ID below and have it all done for you. Try it!

8. See any conversations people are having about you

This one can be somewhat confusing to a lot of people.  By default, if you do not turn on all @replies in your twitter options, you will not see @replies that people send to you if they aren’t following them.  This can be pretty bad, especially if someone that wants to tell you something thinks they sent you a message, and you are just being rude and ignoring them.  Make sure you turn this on.  Just go to twitter and click settings.  On the Notices tab in the @ Replies section, change the drop-down to: all @ replies.  You are all set!

9. Update Multiple Social Networks in Seconds

If you are using a couple different social networks then you probably would love to have a simple way to update all the social networks in one shot.  Enter Ping.fm.  Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap. You can use AIM, GTalk, iGoogle, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, WAP, iPhone/iPod Touch, SMS or even E-mail to let Ping.fm do the job for you.  It’s super simple and saves me a ton of time throughout the day.

10. See Twitter Posts from Around the World

If you have been to any high tech conferences in the last few years, you probably saw Twittervision setup on an LCD panel somewhere.  Twittervision is a real-time geographical visualization of tweets that are occurring on twitter at any given time.  It’s a pretty neat representation of what’s going on in the world.  Now while you’ve probably all seen the 2D Map, have you all had a chance to check out the new 3D Map view of Twittervision?  Pretty wicked.

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