In less than an hour, I’ll be on stage at the Twitter Conference (#140tc) on a panel to talk about tools. Here’s the list I gave Steve Broback in advance, with some examples:

iPhone :
Twittelator Pro
http://www.stone.com/Twittelator/Twittelator_Screens.html
* I just like the interface — it took a little getting used to (because it’s different from TweetDeck). I use TP if what I want to do is check @replies or DMs. If I need to look at a search or list set up on TD desktop, then I use that.

PhotoGene
http://www.i-photogene.com/
* Not Twitter per se but iPhone — quick and easy edits before tweeting — see http://www.i-photogene.com/photogene/Tutorial.html

stats/monitoring/research :
TweetStats
http://tweetstats.com/
* great overview of account activity by key metrics
* see @barackobama (TS1, TS2)

TwitterCounter
http://twittercounter.com/
* show follower trends for most recent 3 month period (@massgovernor)

Trendistic
http://trendistic.com/
* see time trend for keywords (iPad)

Twapper Keeper (Steve talked about this in the AM session)
http://twapperkeeper.com/
* archive hashtag search

Tweetmeme
http://tweetmeme.com/
* broader than trending list

content :
TwitterFeed
Yes, I know it’s an RSS feed. sometimes that’s OK.

finding people :
We need more good directories like govtwit.com

:: This post first appeared at wiredpen
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Danny Sullivan weighs in on URL shorteners, blasting ow.ly for its framed content that deprives the organization that created the content from page views and, thus, ad revenue. Top two: bit.ly and tr.im (I use both). New to me: cli.gs.

ComTweets (@comtweets) is a (free) service that organizes a Twitter community around a common email address, like Facebook organizes networks. The stated goal is to facilitate “easy discovery and communications between coworkers.” This is not unlikeYammer’s goal, but Yammer’s conversations are viewable only by people in the network (common email addresses). Of course, this means adding yet another social networking account to your plate.

Launched in May 2009, ComTweets lets “the world” see everyone who has elected to affiliate their Twitter account with their employer. And it is very easy to set up a new network on ComTweets: you simply sign up with your work email address. The first person to sign up gets to set up the organizational account, like so.

When you associate your Twitter account with an organization/network, ComTweets asks if this is a personal or organizational account. The question caused me to stumble, as I first thought “this” referenced the ComTweets network. Then I realized that ComTweets was asking about the Twitter account that I was associating with the email address. That’s when I knew I was to select “personal.”

Consequently ComTweets appends “employee” beneath my Twitter avatar when it displays my tweets. Note: it does not display @replies.

It’s possible that ComTweets could have two networks for UW, as we have two different sets of syntax for the same email address — uw.edu and u.washington.edu. We’re probably not the only large network with an issue like this, evidenced by this June blog postexplaining how to merge networks.

If your website or blog allows javascript, you can easily display tweets from the aggregated feed.

There are a few large-ish communities on ComTweets but in the main the numbers are small:

• CNN: 20 twitters, 21,915 tweets, 5,892,228 reaches
• Comcast: 27 twitters, 7,726 tweets, 51,929 reaches
• Google: 76 twitters, 35,898 tweets, 1,831,262 reaches
• IBM: 153 twitters, 68,875 tweets, 112,776 reaches
• Microsoft: 276 twitters, 183,891 tweets, 570,308 reaches
• Sapient Interactive: 1 twitters, 149 tweets, 126 reaches
• Temple University: 1 twitters, 59 tweets, 248 reaches
• Virgin Media: 4 twitters, 8,528 tweets, 1,269 reaches

What do you think? Useful or not?

This post first appeared at WiredPen.

TweetDeck released version 0.32.0 today, a desktop application update that includes the new Twitter retweet feature. On the plus side, TweetDeck makes it easy to choose between sending an edited retweet and a new retweet. On the negative side, TweetDeck does not bump a tweet if you are already following a person who has been retweeted.

The developers thought first of the account holder author: when you click the TweetDeck retweet icon, TweetDeck asks you if you want to just retweet (the new feature) or “edit then retweet.” If you change your mind, you must make the second choice, then highlight/delete. And you can make this decision permanent in settings.

However, unlike Tweetelator (iPhone only), TweetDeck does not “bump” the new retweet. Why is this a big deal? As I wrote two weeks ago:

One of the advantages (to the original author) of RTs is that each becomes a new tweet, a new instance. This increases the chance that someone will “see” the original tweet.

Think of a retweet as “bumping” an item “up” in time. But that’s not how the new Twitter.com interface works. On low volume accounts, this isn’t a big issue. But on moderate– to high-volume accounts (measured by number followed), it is. Here’s why.

Twitter doesn’t “bump” the old tweet — it merely changes the “retweeted by” count. So if you read your Tweets on theTwitter.com site and missed a tweet the first time around, you’ll miss it each-and-every time it’s retweeted … because it will remain in “history,” far below the fold.

TweetDeck desktop does, however, flag a new retweet and does so in a way that provides more visual information to the reader than the Twitter web interface. Note that the timestamp is that of the original tweet, not the retweet, which looks very odd in your timeline.

TweetDeck is following the paradigm established by Twitter. If you are reading Twitter via the web interface, you’ll find that Twitter does not “bump” a tweet if you are already following someone who has been retweeted since you read the original tweet. Moreover, because that Tweet is “in history” (so to speak), that tweet will never show that it has been retweeted. This oversight remains a fatal flaw in this system, in my opinion.

This post first appeared at WiredPen

How many times have you looked at the Twitter trending topics list and said, “Huh?” That’s assuming, of course, that you’re on the Twitter web site and that trending topics are visible in your sidebar!

No need to scratch your head in wonder any longer, however. Bookmark WhatTheTrend? to see the top trending topics on Twitter as well as a short explanation of why the topic is trending.

Yes, this is a human-powered tool, with all the shortcomings that implies. It is a “personal web experiment by Matt Mayer, a Shanghai-based British web developer for RIA agency ReignDesign.”

The WhatTheTrend? page does not auto-refresh in Firefox 3.5.2 (Mac), but a quick command+r will solve that nit.

And the web site is not always going to have an explanation, as the introductory screenshot reveals. Also, the site may not present the latest trends in the order that they appear on TwitterSearch.

However, click through any trending topic and you’ll find representative tweets, news headlines and images. That’s adding a bit of value! Those links take you, in turn, to the appropriate Twitter search, Google News search, and Flickr search.