Free Traffic

I’ve put together a list of the coolest plug-ins and apps
designed for us Twitterholics and scored each out of five
on the *must have* scale.

Twitter Specific Tools:

1) TwitterFox  is a Firefox extension that notifies you of
your friends’ status on Twitter and lets you make posts
from your browser status bar. It also allows you to switch
between multiple Twitter accounts in one click. This is my
#1 must-have, deal-breaker, cannot live without Twitter
plug-in.

Must Have Scale: * * * * *

2) Retweet This
is an application designed for use with the Greasemonkey
(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748)
Firefox plug-in. It allows you to append a retweet button
to the end of each Twitter entry to encourage your followers
to retweet your posts.

Must Have Scale: * * *

3) Classify Twitter Users is a
script that allows you to classify Twitter users and decide
whether they are worth following based on their friends,
followers and post ratios. Another Greasemonkey app, it’s
a great tool to help you weed out the Twitter spammers and
fan boys from the socially healthy.

You can set the script to use your own Twitter user scales
(e.g. spammer, social climber, social rock star) or just
gather more information about people you are following.

Must Have Scale: * * * *

4) TwittAd allows Twitter users
to monetize their account by accepting advertising on the
background image of their Twitter user profile. You decide
the duration and price advertisers pay for exposure and get
paid for every hour you serve the ad.

Must Have Scale: * *

5) TwitterCounter  lets you add
a daily updating TwitterCounter to your blog so everybody
can see how popular you are by the number of persons
following you.

Must Have Scale: * * *

6) TweetBeep is just like having
Google Alerts for Twitter. It enables you to keep track
of conversations that mention you, your products or your
company via email. You can even keep track of who’s
tweeting your website or blog. It’s a great tool for online
reputation management and you don’t even have to be a
Twitter user to benefit from it. TweetBeep is another one
of my personal *must haves*.

Must Have Scale: * * * *

7) Twitter Grader measures the
reach and authority of a Twitter user, calculated by the
pace of their updates, the completeness of their profile,
their number of followers and the network power of those
followers.

Twitter Grader displays as a score out of 100 and is
consistently updating and adapting as your Twitter account
grows. Based on those grades, Twitter Grader lists the
Twitter Elite globally
and in each country, just like Technorati
 does for bloggers.

Must Have Scale: * * *

TwitPic, as the name suggests,
is a photo sharing tool for Twitter. When logged in, it
allows you to upload photos and post them with comments as
a Tweet. It works with a range of Twitter clients such as
Twitterific, Twhirl and MobileTwitter and stores all your
photos in a single location with updated viewing stats. As
far as Twitter image sharing goes, this is king for
reliability.

Must Have Scale: * * * * *

9) Twuffer is a Twitter buffer. It
allows Twitter users to compose a list of future tweets,
and schedule their release. Twuffer is ideal for making
hourly, daily or monthly announcements or send post-dated
birthday greetings or reminders to people about upcoming
events. It’s also perfect if you’re the type of person who
wants to give the impression that you never sleep.

Must Have Scale: * * *

10) Twistori I have a real soft spot
for this one. One of the developers is Amy Hoy, one of my
favorite speakers from Webstock 2008
 and a goth geek to boot.
Twistori is a social experiment that taps into the Twitter
conversations revolving around life’s central activities:
Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Feel, Wish. You can click on
any of these emotions and witness a live feed of Tweets
that use them. It’s voyeuristic and utterly compelling.

Must Have Scale: * * * *

11) iTweet is another interface for
Twitter. It has built-in auto-refresh, search and hash tags
and features full follow, block and notifications features.
Users can view and post user bio, location and URLs inline
with their tweets. Another cool feature of iTweet is the
ability to Retweet a user post with a single click.

Must Have Scale: * * *

12) Twitturly is a service for
tracking what URLs people are talking about as they talk
about them on Twitter. Similar to Digg, on Twitturly,
people “vote” for a URL. The more votes it gets the better
it ranks. If it does well enough, it gets promoted to the
home page and as the votes increase it gets displayed
higher up the home page. Twitturly differs from Digg in
that instead of voting on their site, you vote by
participating on Twitter. Each time that you send a link to
your followers on Twitter, Twitturly takes a note of it and
applies your vote to that URL. It’s a great way to follow
the loudest global conversations.

Must Have Scale: * * * *

13) Mr Tweet is another big favorite
of mine. Similar to LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/), it
looks through your extended network and makes suggestions
to help you build effective relationships on Twitter. For
example, which of your followers should you be following in
return? Who are the most influential people you should be
following? Who are your followers following?

Must Have Scale: * * * * *

14) Twitter Search is
Twitter’s own built-in and oft-overlooked search tool. You
can use it to search for other Twitter users, keywords, hash
tag topics and a range of cool shortcut items.

Must Have Scale: * * * *

Non Twitter Specific Tools:

15) FlipTitle is, not
surprisingly, a tool that enables you to flip text upside
down. It’s great for Twitter because sometimes your tweets
can get lost in the conversation. Using FlipTitle makes
sure they get noticed.

Must Have Scale: * *

16) Bit.ly is a very cool URL shortener
that also includes click-thru statistics. Why is it perfect
for Twitter? Because the length of the converted URLs is
generally much shorter than other URL converters like
TinyURL. When you are tweeting, space is premium as your
whole post can only consist of 140 characters including
spacing.

The other neat thing aspect of Bit.ly is that it keeps a
record of clicks that your URLs received and where they
originated from. It even provides a share button so you
can re-tweet your URLs on Twitter or send them to friends
on Facebook, Gmail or another email client.

Must Have Scale: * * * * *

So there you have it, 16 cool tools to help you indulge
your Twitter addiction.