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Category: Insight

Top Twitter Tools & Applications

During one of my last presentations, I noticed some of my participants frantically scribbling notes whenever I would open up my “Twitter Tools” bookmark folder in my browser as if they were some secret collection. These are all in fact, free public tools that I have simply bookmarked over time.

To prevent this scribbling from happening in the future, I figured I should share my list. It’s really nothing more than various Twitter database leveraging tools and applications, each with specific purposes. Some are great, others, not so much. At the end of the day, it depends on what it is that you are trying to do. I also have most of these on my public Twitter links page via Delicious, for those of you not into static lists.

Data, data, data, and more data…

For those of you that missed it, the February 27th-March 5th edition of The Economist featured a special report on the over abundance of data, and where we’re heading with it. This may seem like a boring topic at first, but if you start reading , you’ll quickly realize why I continue to be so interested in social media, especially the broader social-cultural and global implications of  all the content/data that we are feeding into “the cloud“.

Rather than providing you with a summary of the article (which hopefully you will read in full), I am providing some excerpts which I highlighted myself while reading:

  • There are 4.6 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide (though many people have more than one)
  • By 2012 the amount of traffic flowing over the Internet annually will reach 667 exabytes
  • Farecast can advise customers whether to buy an airline ticket now or wait for the price to come down by examining 225 billion flight and price records.

2009 Social Media User Segments

A while back I read the book “Groundswell” by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research. I was very impressed at the time, with what seemed to be the most comprehensive analysis of social media user segments available, explained very nicely in a book. I have since used many of their graphs and diagrams in my presentations, however I always wished that there was a better way to use their research. Naturally, this goldmine of data was bound to evolve into something more interactive, customizable and useful for people actually trying to apply it. Enter the Consumer Profile Tool (below), now with 2009 data, including Canadian statistics!