Fog of Eternity | Website design and discussion

I’ve spoken a few times recently about how much I’m enjoying Twitter. And it seems that there’s a developing appreciation of the value that it can offer. Used effectively it can really add value to your networks and increase your knowledge. There are a number of sites out there that can help increase that effective use, and give a greater appreciation for the functionality of Twitter. I’ve identified three that I think are great.

Twitterholic

It took me a little time to work out that the joy of getting involved in Twitter is the ability to follow anyone. Even if they’re not interested in following you back, keeping updated on tweets by industry leaders and experts is invaluable. Some of those individuals you can probably identify easily from their blogs, but if you can’t, or if you’re new to the social networking arena, then Twitterholic is invaluable.

It’s pretty simple. Twitterholic lists the Top 100 Twitter users based on either followers, friends, or number of updates. Handily it also provides minimal profile information for those users on the main ranking list - so you can quickly check a blog or homepage of a popular user to see if they’re someone you should be watching.

Twitterholic lets you identify some of the users you can’t afford not to be following, and it’s also possible to take a look at your own stats and trends. That gives it an added functionality that can give you a good overview of the development of your Twitter network over time.

Who Should I Follow?

Of course if everyone just followed the big names they’d discovered on Twitterholic then it would be a pretty samey and boring Twitter experience. In developing my own network of followed and followers I wanted to be able to find users with similar interests to my niche. And I also wanted to have a look at people who might be potentially useful contacts in geographical areas I might want to find work. This is where Who Should I Follow? comes into its own.

WSIF drills down a bit further to provide you advice on who you should be following. You can tweak your preferences to get suggestions of popular or less popular users, or specify a geographical location and get suggestions of users from there. As an example, I’m going to be moving permanently to Southeast Texas in the next year and so I used WSIF to find Twitter users interested in social networking and website design from the Houston area.

If Twitterholic is going to give you the heads up on great people to follow to stay informed, WSIF seems to be the option that’s going to help you find people to develop more communicative relationships.

Strawpoll

Not so directly useful to an individual, I’ve picked out StrawPoll as an example of using Twitter in a clever way. Every day the site posts an either or question - e.g. “Webmail or Desktop Client?” - and develops a live bar chart of tweets in response. You simply tweet back to @strawpoll with your choice, and any comment you might have. The choice is logged and impacts the chart, while the comment is posted on the page as well.

The presentation is excellent and it’s worth taking a look at some of the surprising results the polls sometimes come up with. But it’s also a demonstration of some of the wider functionality of Twitter, how the application can be used for different purposes.

Function with some fun

In the quest to be a social networker it’s sometimes easy to fall into the trap of seeing it as a chore. Hopefully the options above will help the effectiveness of Twitter as a tool, but also make it a more interesting and enjoyable application to use.

Filed under: Review, Social Networking, Tools and Apps by Robin Cannon

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