wondering

Wondering if I should have called this post "Twondering"

 So there have always been ancillary Twitter apps and tools to help you get more from Twitter. But lately, their coming out like wildfire. People love mashing Twitter, and the abundance of fun names for these new tools is wowing. And definitely hard to keep straight. So I'm attempting to put a slew (probably more like a fraction) of them in one place. 

I'm sure there are not just some, but HUNDREDS I am missing. But here's a start:  

• TweetVolume: cool little site that lets you see what is twittered most often. E.g., dog 328,000 vs. cat 84,000 or puppy 20,300 vs. kitten 7,130. Twitter is a dog's world. Though @sockington the cat kicks @elguapito the chiahuahua in followers. Damn you @sockington!
• Stocktwits: Follows what stocks people are talking about - gives you lots of ways to customize. This is smart. Love it.Twitter Grader: find out how you rate in the twittershere. gives you a percentage rating score. is good for competitive types who see someone they find to be boring is ranked higher than them. Or just to strive for that illusive 100% rank.
• TwitSnip: browser "bookmarklet" that let's you grab a bit of text from a site and Tweet it as a quote.
• TwitPic: Place to find pics being posted everywhere. And, if you posted pics on Twitter, say, through an iPhone app -- they are collected for you on TwitPic.
• Twiddeo: Ditto but with videos
• TweetCube: Ditto but file formats.
• SnapTwit: let's you send Flickr photos to Twitter
• Twibler: integrates Twitter & Ebay.
• Qwitter: is like the mindreading abilities that you've been dying for. No one can leave you without your knowledge, but then when they leave, you overanalyze the Twitter you sent just before they left, and then beat yourself up b/c maybe you lowered your twitter standards for that post. Qwitter is a must, and it's awesome. But Qwitter also sucks.
• Tweet Beep: a service that will alert you when people are Twittering about whatever keywords you assign.
• Twilert: same thing. has a little more flexibility with how to customize searches and how often to read reports. www.twilert.com 
• Tweader: lets you isolate and follow any particular Twitter thread. Just don't get carried away and think it's text. lest you private-tweet the public timeline.
• Twitter Search: enough said.
• Tweet Scan: Same as Twitter Search, just non-owned by Twitter. Search twitters to find out who's talking about whatever topic you like. Can view dashboard with multiple terms too, and ask for alerts.
• OutTwit: integrates Twitter with Outlook, so you get & updates Twitters from your e-mail. I don't get this. But to each his own.
• Tweet Sixteen: Find the first 16 Twitters of anyone with a Twitter account
• Twittfriends: Let's you see if and how you are connected to  your Twitter followers. Seems a little buggy though.
• Twittervision: the grand-daddy of Twitter apps -- shows real-time twitters on a globe interface.
• TweetLater: lots of stuff for busy "Tweeple" -- like scheduling Tweets in advance, auto-following new followers, creating a personal tweet feed, and setting up keyword alerts. Though by the time I got there, I was pretty Tweeted out. 
• SecretTweet: the Twitter version of postsecret.com -- only in text. A place Twitter anonymously.

Apps for your browser, iPhone or SmartPhone or BlackBerry:

• Twittelator Pro, TwitterFox, TwitterShare, Snitter, Twhirl, Twitteroo, Twitterific, Twitterfon, iTweets, Twinkel, Tweetsville, TwitterBerry, the list goes on.

For the record, my favorite for iPhone is Twittelator Pro. I'm liking Tweetie, but somehow, Twittelator seems to be simpler to manage views.

Twitter Terms (thank you Mashable for some great ones on this list that I wasn't yet familiar with):

• Retweeting: taking a tweet from someone you follow, and retweeting it to your network.
• Tweeple: no explanation needed
• Tweet-up: a meeting of peeps in your tweet network
• Twaffic: Twitter traffic
• Mistweet: a twitter you later forget
• Twalking: twittering while walking
• Twittosphere: ditto
• Twittermob: see Motrin-gate
• Twitterpated: to be overwhelmed with twitter messages
• Twitterrhea: no explanation needed

I have nothing else to say. So sayonara, tweetheart.

Wondering when Facebook will fall...

Ok, so I've been meaning to start this blog thing for awhile. I'm a creative director with a passion everything digital marketing. There's SO MUCH going on out there, but I figure it's good to start simple. For me, here's what's simple: Twitter.

Granted, I get 200 e-mails a day, and no less than 5 meetings a day, and so I don't have a lot of time to go to Facebook and wade through it all. YES, you can get Facebook on the iPhone. But i still have to see all the stupid crap everyone is doing, and learn who threw a snowball or did well on the movie quiz, plus get to see what bad photos of me that have been tagged. To do list: untag Facebook photos.

From the moment I joined Twitter (@shweri), I knew it was brilliant. So simple, yet so engaging.

There is no bullshit surrounding it. It has one purpose. Characters are limited to 140, saving all of us from any long-windedness (even saving ourselves from ourselves). And Twitter comes to you. I never go to Twitter.com. I text from my Blackjack and use Twittelator Pro on my iPhone.

You can turn off individuals you follow remotely (e.g., those always Tweeting about drinking coffee or working late again). It's your time. You shouldn't have to be bored. And people can turn you off too. Good motivation for you to raise the bar too. It's beautiful. 

True, if you don't have an unlimited data plan, you're screwed. But c'mon. It's time to get a data plan!

So I'm a Twitter faithful. My creative team is on board. We brought Twitter extensions to campaigns for P&G clients when it was still fairly new (thanking @biz and his crew for their help). Yes, it's a small audience. But as Motrin will tell you, it's an important audience. And as the world gets more overloaded with the onslaught of input, Twitter will go more mainstream and will have an advantage over the Facebooks of the world. Sort of like when Google showed up on the scene and was such a relief from Yahoo. It was simple and focused.

Beyond the simplicity, Twitter gives you a break from the uncomfortable forced social networking niceties that haunt you on Facebook. Your long-lost high school acquaintances can't friend you on Twitter. They can follow you, but you don't need to confirm or follow them back. Each time I'm guilted into confirming people I haven't seen in decades on Facebook, I know I'll continue to shrink (run, hide) from this platform.

The world is going bite-sized, baby, and I'm all over it.

Which is funny given the length of this post! So I will make this a two-parter. So stay tuned to the about Twitter topic that sparked me to start here with my blog before Facebook sidetracked me.

And do tell me if you think I'm smoking crack here. Most people seem to love Facebook. (I thought it was fun for about 3 or 4 weeks.) Maybe I'm just less tolerant of clutter because I have so much of it.