Twitter has taken a lot of heat for being a vehicle of mindless, narcissistic chatter. Sure. Twitter is that, but it’s so much more. You just need to know how to find the good stuff.

Election 2008

Courtesy of Twitter, you can follow hot topics concerning the US election to keep up to date on this race that concerns us all whether we like it of not.

You see the latest updates from the official campaign Twitter accounts of both candidates and a live stream of all the public tweets mentioning Obama/Biden or McCain/Palin. It’s like a live and personal poll and at times it’s very interesting.

Several third party developers are also making tools to take advantage of all the information that is available on Twitter or to present it in innovative ways. Here are 5 fun things to do with Twitter — some of them are even quite useful.

TwitPic

If you send your tweets (twitter updates) directly from Twitter, you are limited to sending 140 characters of text. Thar’s it.

With TwitPic, you can also distribute links to pictures. All you have to do is log in and upload an image of your choice. You can also add a location, tags and a short message.

Once the photo is uploaded, TwitPic also gives you the option to share it in other channels, like email, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Delicious and more. There is also a code to embed it in your blog or web site and a badge that shows your recent TwitPic updates.

TwitPic also allows people to comment on the uploaded images. There’s a lot of useful interactivity here.

TwittEarth

Ever wonder where on Earth all the tweets originate? With TwittEarth, you can get a sense of just that. You won’t see a geographic rendering of all the updates in Twitter’s public time line, but you’ll see where all the TwittEarth users are.

This is an alternative way to update your status on Twitter. Go to TwittEarth, where you’ll see a 3D image of Earth. Then little cartoony characters pop up and sprout a text bubble with their update message. As you watch, clusters form where most people are active at the moment.

To participate, you log in with your Twitter username and password. Then you type your update and give your location. The globe then spins to reveal a little avatar speaking your update. This might be a good idea to use when teaching geography.

Twemes

You might not know this (I didn’t): Twitter allows you to highlight words in your tweet by prefacing them with #. This turns the word into a tag and this is where Twemes enters.

Say my friends and I were planning a garden party (and let’s say, for the sake of argument that they are all on Twitter). I could send them this message:

Twitter #susisgardenparty to add tweets – http://twemes.com/susisgardenparty

All those that contribute to planning the party now know that they can go to http://twemes.com/susisgardenparty to follow the activities.

Twemes adds further useful functionality to Twitter by allowing people to comment on items. It is also possible to reply to a specific tweet by clicking on the reply link below that tweet. This will take you to the twitter website with the update box already filled with the tweme and the @name of the twitterer that wrote the tweme.

Crowdstatus

Crowdstatus is a tool labeled “Very much in Alfa”. And it isn’t 100 percent stable. But it could become a useful tool.

It lets you set up a crowd — a group of people you follow on Twitter. You then get a URL where you can go to see all of their most recent updates in one place.

At the moment, Crowdstatus only works with Twitter, but you might soon add friends from Facebook or Seesmic.

Get Twittered by Pandia

If you are using the popular Twitter service to keep track of what your friends are doing, you may also get an update every time Pandia publishes a new article or news story.

Use Twitter’s search field for finding people and search for pandianews. Beside the Pandia listing you will find a “follow” button. Click on it!

That’s it. You will never miss a Pandia article again.

See also
3 ways to search Twitter