Get a Better Experience on Twitter

 

 

 

With roughly 250 million tweets doing the rounds each day, it’s no wonder that Twitter is the place to get information on anything and everything. Nimish Dubey has a few suggestions on how you can do this better

    Utter the word ‘Twitter’ and there’s a fair chance that most people will think that you are referring to the social network that lets you express your views and read those of the ones you are following in an all too brief 140 characters. A network that is rapidly becoming notorious for celeb tweeters (those who use Twitter) who often put their feet in their tweeting mouths, costing them followers and sometimes ministerial positions.
However, there is more to Twitter than just 140 characters. One of the biggest advantages of having a Twitter account is the fact that you can get brief news snippets and view website links that your followers think are worth reading, throughout the day. It is almost like having a news source that is constantly updating. What's more, you can even read your Twitter – or at least some parts of it – just like a newspaper, and flip through pages, complete with headlines and pictures. Just try these handy apps that give a distinctly newspaper-y flavour to Twitter, and that too without charging you a single paisa.
5 Cool Twitter
Hacks
If you need to find out who has unfollowed you recently, head to www.useqwitter.com. The service sends you a weekly email with a list and also helps identify spammers
To track your Twitter ‘performance’, head to www.twittercounter.com. Once you authorise the app, it will show you a graph with follower statistics and a whole host of other useful information
Start a petition on Twitter using www.twitition.com. You can create, sign and share an online petition here, which your followers can sign At www.screenr.com, you can create a screencast (a video capture of whatever you do on screen + your voice) and sign in with your Twitter account to share it with your followers directly. It works on Mac or PC without any downloads
Twitter Answers at http://ask.mosio.com/twitterlets you ask questions and get answers from people outside of your network. You need to follow Mosio on Twitter and once you ask a question, they’ll send you a response

Flipboard (iPAD ONLY) The app is best known for converting your social networks into a magazinelike format for the iPad and well, Twitter is no exception to this. It not just converts your Twitter feed into a flippable magazine format, but also goes out and pulls excerpts from the web links and pages that have been shared with you. And yes, it also acts as a Twitter client of sorts, letting you retweet, reply and post new messages from within the app itself. You can even read content offline — just load the app once and read throughout the day. Best of all, it shows many of the normal tweets that don't share any links too. By far the best Twitter-as-newspaper app around.
Get it from: iTunes App Store

Paper.li (MULTI PLATFORM) Flipboard may have the bells and whistles, but when it comes to sheer simplicity, you have got to love this online service that converts your RSS, Twitter and Facebook feeds into a newspaper format, with stories slotted nicely into categories. Nope, you do not need an app to make this work — it works just fine within a computer, iPhone or Android browser. You can even rearrange items and add feeds about other subjects and users to come out with a more rounded out newspaper to read, and can also check the ‘newspapers’ made by other users. Our complaint? You get very tiny slices of the stories whose links have been shared. But we will take it.
Get it from:http://paper.li 

Tweeted Times (iPAD, PC) In terms of concept, Tweeted Times is very similar to Paper.li — you go to a website, sign in using your Twitter details and hey presto, all the news gets laid out in a neat newspaper-like format. However, there is a little twist in the tale here — Tweeted Times actually presents and ranks stories as per their popularity among your friends. You can also generate newspapers using Twitter Search and Twitter Lists. While it works faster than Paper.li in terms of generating newspapers, you do not get the kind of control over content that Paper.li gives you. And once again, only very small bits of news are actually available to you, making you head to the sites for some details.
Get it from: http://tweetedtimes.com 

News.me (iPAD, PC) This is one service that not just converts your Twitter feed into a newspaper but even acts like one, delivering it to your mailbox first thing in the morning. You can also view these on your iPad at any time by downloading the News.me app from the App Store. Presentation is rather straightforward and frankly, not too newspaperish — it is more like one story below the other, with images and media files thrown in. However, we love the fact that we can opt to view the complete story (you only see a small portion by default) either using a specially streamlined and fast view within the app itself or view it in all its glory in the browser. You can also look at the News.me streams of those you follow (if they are using News.me, of course) and of some prominent people. Very neat, we think.
Get it from: http://news.me 

Evri (iPAD ONLY) The latest contestant in the ‘social network is a magazine’ app arena, Evri is being seen by many as a rival to Flipboard. And it certainly adds a lot of newsy fizz to your Twitter reading experience. All you need to do is log in to your Twitter account from within the app to see excerpts of the links shared laid out in a page after page format, a bit like a feature-heavy newspaper. In a very neat touch, you also get links to related subjects; so a story on Steve Jobs will also give you the option to check out news about Apple and the iPhone. You can share stories and read their full versions (you do get very decent chunks of them in the app itself) on the browser or within the app itself, and even opt to read them later offline using Instapaper and Read It Later. An excellent option for those who love reading. Sadly, even this works only on the iPad.
Get it from: iTunes App Store

Tweed (iPAD ONLY) ‘The Twitter app that's just for links’ is the line used to promote this app and it certainly lives up to it. It arranges the Tweets with shared links on the left hand side of the display and all you need to do to view a link is tap on the tweet and the link opens on the right hand side of the display in the form of a card which can be expanded — no, you do not need to go into a browser to read it. You can share articles and opt to read them later using Instapaper. Nope, not quite classic newspaper reading as we know it but a very good effort at highlighting Twitters newsy side. And we like the concept of cards that side up and down as you select different stories. Who knows, maybe this is what newspapers could become — a series of headlines with the option to simply touch and read the story you want to? But that is another story.
Get it from: iTunes App Store