I have just realized that when I type letter "t" in my browser there is a whole bunch of (to me previously unknown) Twitter services. I have been freelancing at some agency last week, and was looking for some twitter data, and came across all this stuff. While I am not very quick to confirm if those things actually make any sense and/or are useful, I thought I should post them here nevertheless and let people decide for themselves. So ... there's TweetRush (really, no idea who would find this interesting & why). Then, there's Twitrratr which claims it allows you to discover "what people are really saying on twitter" (um, as opposed to ... what?). The service then divides the updates in categories "positive", "negative", and "neutral" (according to some content analysis which I sincerely hope is a major duty of some poor intern) and gives the REAL opinion on your brand, product, or personality. But since the numbers rarely reach 4 figures, I am not quite sure why would anyone care. Twistori also found its way in my browser last week, and that's the one I actually always liked. Next is Twitterholic which calculates the number of followers (wrongly correlated with popularity). When I used it for my Twitter screen name, I have also gotten a list of "similar people based on location and/or description." One of them lives in "candy land". Totally makes sense. Anyway, there is also TweeterLocal, which uses the same Adobe Air platform as Tweetdeck but filters all tweeter feeds by location. Does that even make sense? (I guess the answer is yes if you are somewhere like sxsw, i.e. temporary at some location together with a number of people you know). There is Twitpic which is alright, and TweetDeck which some people use and some don't, depending on their emotional - and otherwise - investment in Twitter. Finally, there's Qapture, which i am not going to say anything bad about because a) it's just been released and i am not yet tired of it; b) it is time-based; and 3) it is a possibly useful filtering tool for those who are into it. But mostly it's an accumulation of people with the biggest followings in a certain category, and basically amplifies their influence. The raw number of followers is only an indirect indicator of influence b/c it talks only about the size of your network and not about its dynamics (how info spreads there, who pays attention and who doesn't, who RT your stuff, etc). But whatever. Numbers are again so low that I am not sure if any brand should care (e.g. most clicked to content has 233 clicks. I think that may be even worse than banner ads' click-through rates).
p.s. the image above is of Follow Cost, and after initial, very short lived excitement, I discarded idea as pretty dumb, because, when you really think about it, the number you get as an output means NOTHING. And this makes it a great illustration of what you get from most of Twitter services. :)
