Getting the most out of Twitter is more then answering the question, “What are you doing” in 140 characters. Here is a list of Twitter apps developed to help enhance and optimize your Twitter experience, save you time – yes, it is possible, and maybe even make your tweets more interesting.

1. Bitly – bit.ly is a utility that allows you to shorten a long URL, share it, and then track the resulting usage. Do you like to share blog posts, images or videos on Twitter, Gmail, Email, and Facebook? You can do it simply and quickly using the bit.ly sidebar bookmarklet. Then track the performance with complete statistical history of your bit.ly links in real-time.

2. Twitpic – TwitPic lets you share photos on Twitter. You can post pictures to TwitPic from your phone, the TwitPic API, or through the site itself. There are also popular Twitter clients that have built-in support for TwitPic. If you have a Twitter account then you already have a Twitpic account, just login to Twitpic with your Twitter username and password and you are all set.

3. Tweetie 2.0 – Twitter client for your iPhone. Explore all of Twitter, from your own timeline and mentions, to the favorite tweets of your followers and friends.

4. Hootsuite – A browser based Twitter client. You can manage multiple users and multiple Twitter profiles, schedule tweets, feed your blog RSS, organize your Twitter stream into friends, news, search terms, keyword tracking – whatever you like, and measure your success with built-in statistics. Manage your entire Twitter experience from one easy-to-use interface. Only downside is you can’t manage who is following you from Hootsuite.

5. TweetDeck – Is a downloadable application for staying in touch across Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. Manage multiple Twitter accounts, Record, share and watch video clips within TweetDeck, organize your Twitter stream into friends, news, search terms, keyword tracking. TweetDeck is also available for your iPhone.

6. Digsby – A multiprotocol IM client that lets you manage all your IM, email, and social network accounts from one easy-to-use application. For social networks, it provides a newsfeed of events on the network and the ability to set status with support for Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

7. Brizzly – Is a new Twitter client that allows you to use multiple accounts, monitor searches, share photos, save drafts and wiki-describe trending topics. A nice feature in Brizzly is that it has an explanation for why each trending topic on Twitter is popular. If your note a fan of columns, like in Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, you might like Brizzly for it simple and user-friendly interface. Note: It’s still in private beta, you can request an invitation to try it out on their website.

8. Friend or Follow – A basic service that helps you manage your Twitter contacts. Submit your Twitter screen name to find out who you’re following, who is not following you back, and who is following you that you’re not following back.

9. Screenr – Instant screencasts for Twitter. Screenr allows you to create screencasts for your followers as easily as you tweet. With Screenr’s web-based recorder, there’s nothing to download. Your screencasts play everywhere, even on iPhones.

10. TweetStats – Interested in tracking and measuring your tweet statistics? TweetStats graphs your Twitter Stats including – tweets per hour, tweets per month, tweet timeline and reply statistics.

What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment below or talk to me on Twitter!

Twitterfeed has announced new upgrades making publishing feeds much faster than before.

1) Pubsubhubbub real-time feed publishing - Twitterfeed now works with Pubsubhubbub. This means that sites enabled with Pubsubhubbub, like Typepad and Blogger sites, will be able to see their posts published in real time. For WordPress users, Twitterfeed willl be announcing support soon for RSScloud so that your sites can also be published in real time.

2) Publish to Facebook - You can now automatically publish to Facebook from Twitterfeed.  You can also see statistics for each post showing you just how many people clicked on posts from Facebook vs those from Twitter. You’ll be able to better understand just where your social media strategy is working.

3) Google Analytics Integration – Twitterfeed now adds special ‘UTM’ tags to each post that it publishes. Google Analytics can read these tags and integrate the information into its reporting. You’ll be able to understand how people clicking on your posts from Facebook differ from those clicking from Twitter and track the complete path of their visit to your site.

For more details go to the Twitterfeed Blog

What in the world is Twitterfeed?

Twitterfeed will automatically feed your blog posts directly to Twitter. So no need to cut and paste the links yourself. Using your RSS feed, Twitterfeed will check your blog as frequently as you choose and post a link to your Twitter page. Twitterfeed will also track the clicks on your link back to your website using your bit.ly account.

It’s a wonder I get any thing done in a day. Are you like me, multi-tasking, trying to get a million things done in a day?

The past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of activity for me; seminars, meetings, networking and family obligations. So much so, that when things finally quieted down I got to thinking about time. Where does it go, how can we feel more productive and can we actually slow time down.

Exploring this idea has created many ideas for me in using social media tools. My goal is to not let the tools steal away time, but to help save time. Managing all the activities I do in a day, and tweaking for time-saving, I want to ensure that it is an activity that supports my goals. Using time efficiently will ultimately slow time down or at least feel more productive and not harried by time.

Today’s Activity: Time Saving Tip for Google Reader (RSS feeds)

I am a RSS junky. I find either an interesting article or site, and “bam” I subscribe. The downside to my compulsion to RSS subscribing is managing all the content, of course Google Reader is brilliant for this. For me I love to hourd knowledge, in fact, if I could download “how to do…” in 3 seconds like in The Matrix, that would be brilliant. I digress. I have so many great feeds in my reader that my morning ritual is over my morning coffee to peruse all the headlines. I then share highlights through friendfeed and twitter etc.

Now with my new goal of time-saving, I realized that visiting my Google Reader page was not as effecient as it could be. It occured to me that I could add Google Reader to my iGoogle. I now I can quickly go through the headlines, and there is a nifty pop-up window with the full content that allows me to skim/read the article. I can also quickly share it out to my social media sphere. I am certain I have just saved at least 5 minutes in my usual 15 minute news gathering period.

If you don’t have Google Reader
If you don’t use iGoogle
I use the Mozilla Firefox browser

Update: Just when I was loving my iGoogle reader, I read, in my RSS feed of course, that a new add-on for Firefox called Integrated Gmail just came out. This app has taken Google Reader and Google Calendar and integrated it into your Gmail. OH BOY! Knowledge and scheduling and contacts all in one place. This definitely works in to my goal of staying organized. I haven’t had a chance to test it out yet, but I will let you know if it will be replacing my iGoogle Reader for my RSS feeds.

Google announced its new Search Options feature for Google Search. Now, instead having to visually sift through page after page of search results, you can, as the Google execs say, “slice and dice” your results.

Search Options:

Genres: When you click on “Show Options” (see image below) the first category of slicing and dicing options are what I call genres . You can show All Results, which is the default, or just the Video results, Forum results, or Reviews. Hardly a comprehensive list of genres (how about Blogs?), but it’s a useful start. It’s also in keeping with Google’s principle of keeping things simple, which I like.

Time: The next category is time. You can further narrow your search by showing the results from the beginning of time (default), or the past 24 hours, the past week, the past year, or what they call “recent results,” whatever that is. In addition to genre and time options, there are options to include more images or more text in your results. Personally, I’m thrilled about the new time span options. I usually type in the year when I want the most recent results, but that often results in old info from sites with a recent date in the footer’s copyright. From my unscientific study of the time sorting options, Google’s algorithm for date sorting is a better than just the regular search results with a date added manually into the search query text.

Wonder Wheel:

I’d be happy with just the above new search options, but Google has gone further and added a couple of bonus options. The first, and coolest (and when I say cool, I mean useful), is the Wonder Wheel. If you’ve ever used mind mapping, then you’ll understand the Wonder Wheel. Type in a query for something like “DIY Solar Power” and you get a central hub or node with the spokes radiating from it. In the center node is your search query and the spokes contain the most likely results. How about an example, you say?

I like energy efficiency, and I’ve been wanting to build my own solar water heater panels, so I did a search for “DIY Solar”. Normally, I’d make my search more specific, something like “DIY Solar Water Heating Panels”. With the Wonder Wheel, you don’t have to be so specific; you can start with a simple, general query and the Wonder Wheel will get you to the specifics faster than trying to exert your own Google Fu prowess in the first search query.

The image below shows the result of my general search “DIY Solar”:

Right away I can see several more specific suggestions on the spokes radiating from the hub,  most notably, “DIY Solar Hot Water Heater” at the 10 o’clock position. Clicking that node, I get this result:

The node “Passive Solar” at 2 o’clock caught my eye, so clicking that I get the result I need: info on building passive solar water heating panels.

Could I have achieved that result faster using a regular text query? Probably, but I use Google every other minute so my Google Fu is strong. Other folks who don’t use Google all the time may find the new Wonder Wheel becomes their prefered search interface.

But search speed isn’t everything. One of the best things about the Wonder Wheel is that its visual format of a hub with branching spokes exposes you to a wide range of possibilities in a very concise format. For example, in my DIY Solar search, I was exposed to solar technologies and alternative methods and materials that I might never have encountered in a regular text search. If you are researching, I can’t think of a faster way to cover ground than using the Wonder Wheel.

Timeline:

The timeline feature is more cool than useful, at least for me. Timeline shows you the frequency versus time of your search query. For example, here’s the timeline from my passive solar search:

As you can see, there was a spike in the use of passive solar during the time of the first energy crisis, then a lull, then a resurgence in interest in the term in our present day. Once again, if you were doing research for a report, this could prove to be an invaluable tool for illustrating specific concepts.

Rich Snippets:

Rich snippets are RDFa or Microformat markup code that gives Google very specific information to display in their search results. Currently, the technology is still being tested with sites like CNet.  Basically, this is a method to give more useful and precise info to Google search users. Up until this moment, Google has been a passive system; that is, it reads the info on my websites without my help. Now, with Rich Snippets, site owners will be encouraged to tag their content so Google can find the best, most informative bits.

I like the idea of this, and not only because it uses the open technology markup formats, but because anything that helps cut through the clutter is good. On the other hand, my cynical side sees this as boon to those who can afford to tag all their content, and a detriment to those who can’t. Will Google give preference to sites with rich snippets? Only time will tell.

Links: Google Searchology’s video and slide presentation about these new features.