I'll admit I'm a rather late adopter of Twitter, the real-time short messaging service that has in recent months taken the tech community by storm, and has as of late seen adoption by organizations such as The Wall Street Journal, Dell, Whole Foods, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer (see twibs for a comprehensive business listing).
My interest in the service changed during the course of CodeMash, an annual developer's conference I co-founded. As it turns out, most of the CodeMash attendees are avid Twitter users, and were regularly posting thoughts regarding their experience attending the various sessions and other functions. Naturally, the organizers were very interested in these posts, using them as one of the barometers for gauging success. The easiest way to keep tabs on the posts was by way of Twitter's great search interface.
As it turns out, though, there are quite a few other ways to track Twitter trends, and even build your own interfaces for posting messages to your Twitter account, not to mention monitoring the posts of your friends. If you're looking for eye-candy, one of the most interesting applications is Twittervision, a mashup pinpointing the location of posting users. Tracking your post frequency is easy using TweetStats. Or, check out emotionally-inspired posts at twistori. View hundreds of other available Twitter-oriented applications at the Twitter Fan Wiki. All of these compelling solutions are possible using the fantastic set of Twitter APIs made available thanks to the Twitter team.
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