Tools of the Twade

I’ve recently become interested in Twitter, the “micro-blogging” service. The 140-character limit, the variety of items published, and the transience of its topics make it very different from most “social media” sites, RSS feeds, or “traditional” blogs.

Particularly intriguing about Twitter, from a technology point of view, is the rich ecosystem of services built around it. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of web applications that feed or read twitter; a quick perusal of the “tweets” I’m following show that a minority are coming from the Twitter website itself; many more are published through third-party tools.

Here are a few of the Twitter tools that I’ve found especially helpful for the way I use Twitter.

Splitweet

I maintain three different Twitter identities: my personal account, DailyDickinson for my Emily Dickinson site, and WeLikeItHere for my Minneapolis-St. Paul blog, We Like It Here. In addition to publishing links to blog posts and interesting sites, I use these accounts to learn about the topics that interest me (literature, photography, programming, Minnesota) and to maintain contact with like-minded people and institutions.

The Twitter site itself isn’t very easy to use with multiple personalities; there’s a single session at a time, so you need to log off and log back in to “become” a different Twitter user. It’s also hard to follow different sets of Twitter feeds on Twitter itself; you’re bound to the feeds of your current identity, and need to switch identities to be sure not to miss something.

That’s where Splitweet is especially useful. Splitweet lets you create a “master” account to which you bind multiple Twitter identities, and see all of your incoming tweets in a single feed. You can turn individual feeds off and on, so temporarily becoming one of your identities is very easy. The interface lets you know which identity each tweet belongs to, and also lets you post tweets as one or more of your identities; re-tweet, reply, or DM on each tweet in your combined feed; and see all incoming replies and DMs in a combined list.

There are a few things that I wish Splitweet offers that it doesn’t. Follower/following management, for example, isn’t part of the interface; I still have to log in to Twitter with my separate identities to manage my connections. And it would be great if it included some of the features of the other tools I use so I’d have just one location to visit. But all in all, it’s an indispensable site for people with multiple personalities.

HootSuite

HootSuite (née BrightKit) is also geared to the multiple-identity Twitter user. You can register all of your Twitter identities, and schedule “tweets” from each. It also allows multiple “editors” for each Twitter account; this would be a useful feature for a group blog, where several people are granted permission to “tweet” from the same Twitter account.

In addition to manually scheduling your “tweets,” HootSuite offers an RSS-feed integrator that will publish feed entries to Twitter. I tried this early on, and found that the service was flaky; apparently their infrastructure was overwhelmed by the service’s popularity, but recent upgrades may alleviate this problem.

twitterfeed.com

Meanwhile, I’ve been using twitterfeed.com for RSS integration. After logging in (through the OpenID interface), you can link multiple Twitter accounts to RSS feeds, and schedule “tweets” from those feeds.

I’ve been using Furl as my “social bookmarking” site for a couple years, because it allows you to build RSS feeds of your bookmarks. By putting links of interest to the followers of each of my IDs into the appropriate Furl category, I can keep my Twitter feeds up to date with relevant information while keeping up with the news. (I use the Furl plug-in for Firefox to make it that much simpler; right-click the page, decorate the link title with appropriate Twitter “#” and “@” info, add to a category, and hey presto! it’s done.)

Twitter Tools for WordPress

Alex King has provided a wealth of plug-ins to the WordPress community; one of the most recent, Twitter Tools, provides easy integration with Twitter.

I use this plug-in to send a “tweet” with each new blog post, and to add a list of recent “tweets” to a couple side bars. It also provides a daily or weekly digest of “tweets” as blog posts.

The automatic “tweet” only happens, though, from the WordPress UI; if you schedule a post for future publication, no tweet is fired, even if the “notify twitter” option is selected. This is where the HootSuite scheduling is handy; I typically put together the Daily Dickinson posts some days in advance, so I can use HootSuite to send those tweets to coincide with the blog publication. It’s a little extra effort, but worth it to keep the Daily Dickinson audience up to date. (I suppose I could also use the RSS feed integration from HootSuite or twitterfeed.com, but I like the targeted timeliness of the scheduled tweet).