I want to

Privatize for private Tweets

I think that Privatize needs to go into a category of 'answering a problem that doesn't exist'. The idea is that you log into your Twitter account, write the message that you only want to share with a few people, and post it. Those who are included on the list of VIPs can then log into Privatize to see the message, while everyone else gets told 'sorry, this isn't for you'. Irritating or what?

My first problem with this service is that I have a feeling that all of the people who follow me, being intelligent sensible people are going to think 'this looks like a possible hacked account, no way will I click on that link, I'll check with Phil first.' This then adds to my workload, it doesn't diminish it. It's also going to annoy the people that the message is not for because I'll have to say 'No, it's fine, but it's not for you'. Way to make friends and influence people or what!?

My second problem is that if I know these people then I can send them a dm. Or an email, or contact them on Flickr, or Facebook or LinkedIn and so on. These social networks exist for a reason, so why not use them correctly? Twitter isn't about private messages to selected groups of people - I really don't see the point.

However, if you're interested in trying it out, give it a shot and tell me what you think!

Turn your tweets into a magazine

The Tweeted Times is one of those tools that lets you curate content directly from Twitter. Very easy to set up - you just allow the tool to have access to your Twitter stream. It then pulls in links to key stories and displays them for you to read in a mazine format - a bit like this:

It's a nice enough tool - I saw a story that I immediately went off and read - and then tweeted about. There's nothing new with tools like this of course - we've already got a lot of them - Zite, Flipboard, Pulse and so on, but this works well on a computer screen rather than on a tablet device. It's a nice fast way to keep up with the news from Twitter contacts.

Visualise your tweets!

Vizify TweetSheet is a simple tool that allows you to get a basic graphic of some of your activity on Twitter. Simple allow it access to your data stream and it will provide data on your last 3,500 tweets - when, how often retweeted, popular retweets and so on. It's not the most amazing thing out there, but it might amuse - particularly as there is an Angry Birds type game to play to knock over your bar chart. Mine looks like this:

Tweeted Links

Catching your links. This resource apparently lists all of the links that you've tweeted. In theory. I tried it with my name and a few others that I know,but to no avail. I'll stick to packratius I think.

freelish.us

Public timeline. Oh dear. This is Twitter under any other name. Seriously, why would anyone want to try and compete exactly with Twitter? The only thing that I can see that they have going for them is the ability to create groups, which I like. However, when Twitter gets around to adding that function, it's going to be 'goodnight Vienna' for them.

Anyway, they say of themselves: "freelish.us is a microblogging service based on the Free Software StatusNet tool. If you register for an account, you can post small (0 chars or less) text notices about yourself, where you are, what you're doing, or practically anything you want. You can also subscribe to the notices of your friends, or other people you're interested in, and follow them on the Web or in an RSS feed."

I'd love to know how you can post a small text notice that's 0 characters or less though!

140 Caps

Typing capital letters to express my feelings!. OK, this has to be the single most stupid pointless resource that I've looked at this year. You get a little box, you type in what you want to say, and it transfers it to upper case. It'll then tweet it for you. Am I seriously to assume that people don't have access to the shift key? To say nothing of the extent to which a tweet of 140 u/c characters is going to annoy someone.

Blogcastr

Blogcastr. This is a bit like CoverItLive, which does the same sort of thing. It lets you blog real time about a subject or event and keeps everything together nice and tidy.

Timely

Timely. This little resource will post a tweet at the most appropriate time for you.

1. It pulls in your past 199 tweets and analyzes them for Retweets (native RTs only).
2. 2 It then plots 24 buckets, 1 for each hour in the day.
3. 3 It then assigns Tweets with RTs to its corresponding time bucket and ignores Tweets without RTs.
4. 4 It then applies the following calculation per time bucket: # of RTs in this bucket / # of RTs within the sample of 199 tweets.
5. 5 It then determines your optimal time buckets starting with best to worst performing and excludes.
6. 6 Finally we perform some additional filters and qualifying to aid the user experience and expectations when using Timely, so it's not just raw buckets.

Twippr

Twippr. Search your friends recent tweets. Erm... that's what it does.

Publitweet

A smarter Twitter widget.Publitweet is a platform to curate real-time content, and make it more readable, shareable and monetizable. Create a search pattern, person, list, whatever and the widget will collate tweets and display them for you.