TastyStartup

Its only been a few days since Twitter rolled out its Twitter lists features to all users, but already a directory of popular lists has emerged.

Discover Lists

Using Listorious you can discover the most popular Twitter lists and search for lists of interest.

Twitter lists provide a great way to expand the people you follow without letting in too much noise – You can easily flick through lists to get an overview of whats happening in any given niche.

So take a look at Listorious and start discovering new and exciting twitter users.

Create Lists

I’ve started to create a list or two and have been doing research into finding the best tweeps.    A good place to start would be seeing how others are using lists.  Robert Scoble is doing an incredible job…..but didn’t offer any clues on his techniques:

My suggestion would be to start by categorizing the people you already are following.  Chances are you are already following a bunch of people in a specific niche.

List Your Colleagues

Work for a startup or brand that uses twitter?  Put your colleagues into a list (if they won’t mind).

Visit WeFollow

WeFollow is a great directory of Tweeps and recently got much better when they started using a better ranking algorithm.  Use keyword search to find tweeps.

These are my ideas – how are you using Twitter lists?

btw. How soon before we see lists of the best lists?

TweetTabs provides an interface similar to Tweetdeck – but solely for Twitter search.  Plus its browser based.

If you track multiple search terms on Twitter like I do, then a tool like this is really useful.  It puts all the info in one page and scanning for new entries is dead simple.

TweetTabs is really simple – it only does one thing, but it does it really well.

Check it Out

Super Chirp is a new service that allows you to charge people for viewing your Twitter stream.

Now I know what you’re thinking! Why would anyone want to pay to look at your Twitter?  But, this could be useful for offering some premium content.  Im sure celebrity users could also find a few peeps to pay.

This wouldn’t work with average joe, but if you having something valuable it could.  There are plenty of membership only blogs, so why can’t there be a membership only Twitter!.

Super Chirp handles all of the payment processing and there is nothign tricky to setup.

In an age where content providers are starting to switch to a paid model – this just might work.

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I run a team of developers, bloggers and designers for Task.fm.  They are based all over the world, from Switzerland right across to Australia.  We all work different hours and are doing 10 things at once.

So communicating on email is starting to get hetic.  One of the tools im trying to get the team to use is Present.ly.  This could effectivly replace a big chunk of our email.

Present.ly is like a private twitter for just your company, team or group.  Users can post updates, reply and dm other users.

So why would a startup like Task.fm need this app – from my perspective, knowing what the team is currently working on is vital.  Previously, getting this info involved me sending daily emails asking for a progress update.  Now I can just login to Present.ly and get a good overview of whats going on.

You can also attach files (great for design work), create groups of users and it even integrates with Twitter.

Check it Out

btw – if you havent already done so, make sure you check out the smartest reminders on the planet – Task.fm

So you’ve tried all the usual ways to get Twitter Followers and even the more dodgy methods, but you still can’t get any followers!  Well you could try buying em.

Featured Users is a Twitter advertising network that you can use to give your profile more exposure and hopefully pick up new followers along the way.

You purchase banner impressions which will be displayed on various web based Twitter apps.  The banner is generated automatically and inlcudes your avatar, username and your Twitter bio.

Does it Work

We decided to put our money where our mouth is and purchase 1000 impressions for $10 ( i know not much to test with but the results should explain why we didn’t want to spend lots).  The result was 15 click-throughs on our banner which, due to the nature of the tracking, we have no idea if these resulted in any actual follows.

The best case scenario would be 15 new followers which certainly wouldn’t be worth $10.

They need to do some tweaking of the banner design and probably switch to a pay-per-click model

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TwitRank will give you a score or rank out of 10 for your Twitter profile.

Where actually not sure how it calculates the score (my profile got a 5/10), but what we do know is there are plenty of other tools which do the same thing but much better.

What is good about TwitRank.me is the sites design, which one would simply describe as “pretty”.

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WeFollow is a Twitter directory cretaed by Digg founder Kevin Rose

This isn’t the first directory of Twitter users, in fact there have been a swarm of directories before it.  But,  we dig the simple and effctive way WeFollow uses to add Tweeps to its directory.

Instead of having to fill out a form on the actual directory site, like others, WeFollow allows you to Tweet it with the 3 cateogires you would like to be placed in.

This means its super easy to add yourself to the directory, and furthermore this creates a viral effect, pushing the directory into others streams.

One flaw in the system is that the entire directory is geared towards popular Tweeps, which in a sense may also be a bonus (for seeking out the twitterati).  If you only have a handful of followers, your profile in the directory will be buried on page xxx.

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Tweet O’Clock is a simple application that will tell you what the best day and time of day to tweet someone.

Simply enter the users Twitter username on the site and it will calculate the best time based on the time day the user tweets most.

p.s 10pm on a Wednesday probably isn’t the best time to Tweet me!

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TinyChat is like TinyURL but for chatrooms.  The idea is you click a button and you are presented with a link to your new chatroom.  You can then easily Tweet this out to your Twitter followers.

This is a great way for extending a conversation beyond Twitter using real-time chat.  This puts a nice web 2.0 twist on chat.  The service is currently not feature rich, but its slick, clean and well designed.

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Ok, so personally I don’t value my Tweets enough to have them backed up – but others might.  TweetBackup will backup all your Tweets on a daily basis.

However there are a few flaws with this concept.  Firstly the idea of doing a backup is so that you can restore the data if something goes wrong.  But, unfortunately Twitter offers no import function and I can’t imagine they ever would (could you imagine the spam).

Secondly I doubt Twitter will start losing your Tweets anytime soon.  Maybe this is just an app for all you hoarders out there.

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