During my recent and ongoing Twitter frenzy I’ve been obsessed with trying to make my twitting experience as easy and efficient as possible.  Many bloggers have spent a fair amount of time reviewing the various Twitter applications available and have compiled great lists giving us a variety of tools to choose from.  Some great posts can be found at mashable and webanalyticsworld.  While those posts and others like it are great, I wanted to put a simple list together of the four apps I use and feel that for moderate to average Twitter user, these are essential and likely the only three you will need.

1. Twitterfox – This is a Mozilla Firefox addon that adds a simple  to the bottom right corner of your Firefox.  When you click on the icon a pop-up appears with a simplified version of your Twitter home page.  You can view replies, direct messages and regular tweets.  Send your replies, retweets and comments directly from Firefox without having to navigate away from what you are doing.
2. tr.im – tr.im is an awesome URL shortening service that is completely integrated with Twitter.  You can create an account with them in order to track hits to the URL’s you shorten, or just use their service without an account and not track your links.  The base URL is one of the shortest available for such services.  Grab the Firefox extension which adds a shortcut button and sliding sidebar.  Shorten URL’s right from the page you are visiting, and tweet them all in one operation without having to visit Twitter or use any other apps.
3. Automagic Twitter Profile URI – The coolest application out there that every blogger should have.  On most blogs, the commenter has to leave an email address. This plugin uses this email address to “ask” Twitter if there is a username with that email address.  If there is a username associated with that email address then their twitter username such as @serialbox will appear next to their name.  The commentor has the option to disable this if they wish.  You can also customize it from your plugin options menu.
4. Commentwitter Plugin – While still in Beta this is aiming to be one of the best twitter blogging tools available.  This adds a simple link to your comment form allowing the commenter to tweet their comment to their twitter account right from your blog.

Now while their definitely a lot more twitter apps and tools available, these four are all I need to tweet to my heart’s content.  The top 10, top 20 etc., type lists are great but it can be time consuming to check out each one and test it.  Through my trials and tribulations the above four listed apps are a must-have.

Tags: blogging, twitter

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 12:23 am and is filed under web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.