I was at Liz Strauss’ Open Comment Night this morning and we were talking about Twitter apps.

An Open Comment Night @ Liz Strauss’ is like an open mic. You just show up, say “Hi” and then say jump into any conversation. You don’t have to read all the comments as you are typing yours — though you really should read all the comments at the end of the Open Comment Night to pick up whatever information and links that you’ve missed earlier.

OK, so, we were all talking about Twitter and our favourite Twitter apps and the million-dollar-question “What happens if Twitter starts charging?” A total of 232 comments were posted in 3 hours (isn’t this crazy?!) and after the dust has settled, as they say, I have gone back and picked up 9 interesting Twitter-related links that Liz herself suggested. I think we were all supposed to share some links but I guess we were all too hyped up we forgot about the sharing part :blush:

As the name suggests, Twitterfeed feeds your blog to your Twitter. All you need to do is sign up for an account for free, provide your blog’s RSS feed URL and Twitterfeed will do the job for you! Alternatively, if your blog is self-hosted, you may also install Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin (which is what I am using). Twitter Tools places a check box on your WRITE POST page and you can uncheck it if you do not want a particular post to be announced on Twitter.

Twitturly is a service for tracking the links/URLs that people are talking on Twitter. It doesn’t matter whether you use the entire long URL or if you have shortened a link using TinyURL, or Snipurl (snurl) or any other URL shortening services, as each “mention” or “vote” will be verified and counted. And to keep things fresh, Twitturly only shows the 100 most popular URLs over the last 24 hours. If you want to know what people are tweeting, Twitturly is the place to go.

Not sure if you should follow your new followers on Twitter? My Tweeple is designed to help you decide whether or not to follow certain people on Twitter when they follow you. You sign up for a free account, sync your My Tweeple account with your Twitter account, and maintain your list of Twitter followers and friends either by following them, unfollowing them, or blocking them.

TweetBeep is like Google Alerts for Twitter! Put in a keyword or website, and get emails when others tweet it! You can easily keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, your company, your favourite subjects, or anything at all! You can even keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL. Just sign up for a free account and you’re ready to go!

TweetScan is like TweetBeep with a search function. Once you sign up for a free account, you can receive updates via email, RSS, or you could use the Click button. TweetScan can also be used to find lost or multi-user replies. TweetScan scan up to five phrases for daily or weekly delivery and best of all, you can turn it off anytime. If you’re like me, trying not to sign up for accounts that you don’t use, you can just type your keyword and hit the SEARCH button, and it will return a list of tweets that mention your keyword.

TwitterLocal lets you generate an RSS or XML Feed to filter out tweets around a certain area. Just enter a city, state, postal code (if you live in the United States), choose the range of miles you want to include, and hit the GO button. You’ll instantly get URLs to add to your RSS reader. I have tried searching for “Malaysia” within a range of 20 miles and the search returned a list of tweets from Twitter users in Malaysia. It really isn’t too bad :D

Monitter is a Twitter monitor that allows you to “monitter” the Twitter world for a set of 3 keywords and watch what people are saying. All you need to do is just type any 3 keywords (maximum) into the search boxes and within seconds you’ll start seeing relevant tweets streaming LIVE.

Twitter 100 shows you your 100 followers’ last tweets. If you have too many followers, you may not be able to follow your of them but with Twitter 100, you can see up to 100 of your followers on one screen!

Tweet Clouds generates a keyword cloud for you so that you can tell, at one glance, what you have been tweeting about. Check out my Tweet Cloud.

There you have it — 9 Twitter apps that you might not have heard of. If you know of any other Twitter apps that you think some readers aren’t aware of, please do share them in the comments! :biggrin:

Also, my Twitter account is http://twitter.com/pelf81/ and I tweet mostly about turtles and conservation (what else?) whenever I can :D And I use Twitter occasionally to network (make new friends) and touch base (keep the old ones).

I watched Eagle Eye quite some time back, and I can’t stop thinking about my online activities after the watching movie. Sure, it is a work of fiction, but somehow or other, I find myself being convinced that we (in general) are spending too much time online, and that we are exposing too much of ourselves on the internet.

I’m not sure about you, but I do have a tonne of online accounts — from emails to online banking accounts to my blogs to the forums that I am a part of to photo sharing sites to social media sites to online bookmarks, you name it, I (think I) have it!

So today, I started doing some account-housekeeping. I have just sent an email each to Bloglines, Amazon Associates and PayPerPost to request that my account be deleted from their respective systems because “I did not utilize it as much as I thought I would”.

This decision is also spurred by something that happened quite recently. A Malaysian government department used a picture of mine (which I uploaded into Flickr) in a brochure that they designed and circulated nationwide. My picture was used on the front page of the brochure but as the photographer, I wasn’t given the credit that I so deserved. I wrote to the said department, and the Deputy Director said that the picture was downloaded by one of their interns and they thought the picture belonged to that intern. I accepted their explanation, and I explained that they could be sued for using pictures without crediting the photographers.

I have this cute little notebook into which I wrote all my online accounts and passwords, so in the next few days, I shall be combing the little notebook, removing whatever online accounts that I am not active in (so that I can sign up for other stuff that I am currently interested in) :upsidedown: It is going to take a while, but I guess this is something that needs to be done sooner rather than later. Plus, I can’t go to bed knowing that I have revealed too much personal information on the internet :grr:

Are you worried about your online presence? Do you think you have revealed too much personal information on the internet? What do you do about it?

Updates: As of Nov 14th, I have opted out of 13 online accounts that I very seldom use. THIRTEEN!