Search

How to turn any blog search into an embeddable widget

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Did you know that you can instantly turn any Twingly blog search you perform into a widget that can be embedded into any website, for free if you integrate it into non-commercial websites like your personal blog (we offer paid licences for commercial use)?

It’s a pretty cool and easy way to show readers of your blog or website what the blogosphere is saying about a particular topic, keyword, company or person – or all links to your own blog. And since the widget updates automatically with fresh content, your site looks up to date even if you haven’t published any new content lately.

In order to get the widget, go to http://www.twingly.com/search and search for whatever you want, for example “iPad”. Now, on the results page, you can filter by different criteria, like date or time period, number of inbound links as well as languages. After you have made your choice, have a look at the box on the right titled “With results…”

Click on the link “Get as widget for your blog”. Voilà! The code appears which you now simply have to copy and integrate inte the source code of your blog or website. There you have it: The latest content from the blogosphere, automatically pulled into your site.

In case you want to show your readers which other blogs are linking to you, enter the following syntax into the search field: “link:name of your blog” (e.g. “link:readwriteweb.com”) , filter if you like and then get the embed code from the box to the right (“get as widget for your blog”).

If you have a specific blog in mind that you want to highlight on your site through a widget, you can also simply type the following syntax into the search field: “blog:name of the blog”, e.g. blog:techcrunch.com or blog:mashable.com. On the results page, change the filters if required, then click the “Get as widget for your blog” link in the right box.

For most blogs we even offer three “out of the box” widgets where you don’t even need to perform a search and filter to create one. You find those widgets on the profile page of each blog. Simply copy this URL into your browser’s address bar http://www.twingly.com/blogs/profile?url= and complete with the URL of the blog, e.g. techcrunch.com or mashable.com (without http:// and www). This brings you to the blog profile page, and if you scoll down a bit, you see the preview of the three widgets. Click on the link at the bottom of each widget (“Get this widget for your blog”) and the embed code appears.

How to use Twingly’s Blog Search to understand what bloggers say about your brand or product

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Twingly Blog Search

For everybody working with marketing, brands and communication, it might be a good idea to occasionally check what’s being said about your products/services/brands in the blogosphere.

In an older blog post we explained how you can set up a handy system with Twingly to monitor the social web. What we didn’t go into detail back then were the advanced search methods you can apply to improve and finetune your search results. Today we want to show you exactly that.

Let’s imagine you are in charge for the marketing of a specific product and you want to get an overview about what bloggers write about that product.

Phase 1

The first step is of course to head to http://www.twingly.com/search, to enter the name of your product (if it consist of several words, put them in brackets) and to press the “Search” button. The result is a list of all blog posts from the Twingly index that contain the name of your product. We provide you with several filters to sort the results, e.g. by date or number of incoming links, time period or language.

Phase 2

Now let’s say you want to get a more detailed impression about who is writing what. Enter our advanced search, which you can access through the link on the right side of the search bar, or directly by opening http://www.twingly.com/advanced_search.

The advanced search gives you a couple of specific filters which you can apply in advance, before you search, to narrow down the results. You can include and exclude words in your search, only search within specific blogs (for example only in “mashable.com”) or search for all blog posts that link to a specific URL on your website (like a campaign page).

Depending on what you are looking for, the advanced search might give you a better picture of your product’s image and reputation among (specific) bloggers.

Advanced search
Advanced search

But that’s not everything the Twingly Blog Search can do for you.

Phase 3

By adding additional commands to your search query, you can go even more into detail and customize your search (actually, the advanced search described above is simply adding some of those commands automatically).

Using additional commands to narrow down your search
Using additional commands to narrow down your search

Here are some search commands that you might find useful for your own brand/product searches. You can always combine them with one or several search terms, like the name of your product/brand.

link:yourwebsite.com
search for any blog post that links to any page on yourwebsite.com

link:yourwebsite.com,yourcompetitor.com
search for any blog post that links to both your website and the one of your competitor

link:yourwebsite.com|yourcompetitor.com
search for any blog post that links to either your website or the one of your competitor

site:randomwebsite.com
search for blog posts on a specific domain

site:randomwebsite.com|otherwebsite.com
search for blog posts on two specific domains

start-date:2011-02-14 end-date: 2011-07-13
search only for blog posts within a specific time range

We hope this helps you to understand where your brand/product stands among bloggers. But keep in mind: The more you narrow down your search, the less results you will get.

How Twingly can help your blog

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Over the years, we have added a bunch of new features, tools and services to our portfolio. Some of our offerings are targeting bloggers, some are for all users looking for information from blogs and microblogs and some are made for enterprise clients.

In this blog post we want to outline how Twingly can help you as a blogger.

We have published a couple of tutorials in the past describing how you can use a particular Twingly feature, but this time our focus is on listing the major ways for you as a blogger to benefit from Twingly, improve blogging, increase your audience and stay informed about what’s going on in in the blog and microblogging world.

Increase audience with Twingly Blogstream

Twingly Blogstream is a technology that we provide to our partner sites (which among others consist of major news and e-commerce players in Scandinavia and elsewhere) in order to allow them to open up to the blogosphere. The Blogstream widget on a partner site shows incoming links from blogs and thus can send back hundreds of new visitors to blogs.

Benefit for you:
Bring lots of new readers to your blog.

Steps required:
Link to one of our partner sites and – very important – ping us!
Here is a step-by-step tutorial explaining how to do that.

Add relevant content to your blog with the Twingly Widget

For bloggers we offer different customizable widgets that you can add to your site to let your readers see who has linked to your blog or what posts that have gotten the most incoming links. There is even an embeddable widget for any search term you enter in our blog search or microblog search.

Benefit for you:
Add context and content to your site, highlight your blog performance

Steps required:
Go to your blog profile (which you find at this URL http://www.twingly.com/blogs/profile?url=http://your-blog-url or by searching for your blog in our blog search engine and clicking on “profile” under the search result for your blog) and click the “Get this widget” link. If you want to add a widget with search results, perform a blog or microblog search for any keyword and click “get as widget for your blog” in the right navigation column.

Here is an explanation with instructions for proper embedding into your blog. If you don’t find a profile for your blog, it’s because you haven’t ping us yet. Do it here.

Monitor the blogosphere

If you are a blogger, you are probably quite interested in knowing which other blogs are linking to you, and you might also have a specific area of interested where you would like to stay ahead of the curve and get information about your preferred topics as soon as they are being discussed on other blogs.

In this case you sould try our blog search engine, which lets you subscribe by either email or RSS to search terms like company or brand names, URLs or other relevant keywords. And if you want, you can do the same with our microblog search engine, covering Twitter and other status update based sites.

Benefit for you:
Get the information you need as a blogger to stay up to date .

Steps required:
Perform a search for the term(s) you want to monitor and subscribe.
Here is a step-by-step tutorial how to do that.

An interview with the CEO of Silobreaker

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We continue our series of interviews with companies that have decided to partner with Twingly to add additional value to their services. This time we asked Kristofer Månsson, the CEO of Silobreaker, to give us some insights into the world of media monitoring and intelligence. The London-based firm connects to our API in order to get the latest data from the blogosphere.

Hello Kristofer. Silobreaker offers a variety of media monitoring and search services. Who is your target group?
Basically, anyone whose job it is to follow, monitor, analyze and understand what’s going on in the world. This includes corporate, military and government intelligence professionals; investment managers, analysts and others in financial services and consulting; PR, communications and other more traditional media-monitors; journalists, researchers and “news junkies” in general.

Give us an insight into the world of intelligence and media monitoring. Where is your industry heading?
We obviously believe in an increasing demand for “smart” technology, since that’s the business we are in. Insight no longer comes from access to information but from your ability to make sense of it. And we cannot solve information overload simply by trying to read more articles. We don’t have the time nor the brain capacity. At Silobreaker, we regard aggregated content as the raw material and not the refined product. We also want to move away from traditional keyword search, since it requires you to know what you are looking for and it returns nothing but “hits” as results (often far too many). The opportunity and competitive advantage comes from the automated analytical processing of the aggregate media flow. That requires computer power and software that is capable of reading, analyzing and contextualizing the information flow and then presenting the findings in intuitive and easy-to-understand results. We want our users to spend less time on searching and have more time for interpretation and decision-making. Technically speaking, Silobreaker combines content aggregation with search, statistical and semantic text-mining and explanatory visualizations to meet a large range of user requirements.

Among other sources you do monitor social media. How important is this area to you?
It has been an important complement to traditional news media for quite a while. Social media have become the obvious channel for things like expressing product sentiment, for the messaging from political parties, NGOs and special interest groups; for calling to demonstrations, and for reporting from major events around the world, including from such places where traditional media is banned or state-controlled. Companies simply cannot afford to ignore social media, nor can analysts who in turn are following the companies.

Are there any new features or services that you are especially proud of?
We have recently launched Silobreaker Premium, a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering for corporate, financial, military and government users. Silobreaker Premium combines aggregation of news content from both traditional and social media together with a suite of analytical tools and visualizations. The aim is to help our customers understand quickly the effects of unexpected events and to discover angles, relationships, stories and perspectives before they become obvious.

You and a bunch of your colleagues are Swedish, but your headquarter is in London. What’s the background on that?
We started Silobreaker with only English-language content, which made UK and US users the obvious targets. So we decided to run business development out of London and product development in Stockholm. Today, we deal with several other languages, including Swedish, and we now also have local sales staff in Sweden. However, 75% of the traffic to our news search engine Silobreaker.com still comes from the UK and North America, so the English-speaking markets remain our largest user base, and London remains a good base for the company.

CisionWire connects with bloggers

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Cision is one of the biggest players worldwide among press services, with businesses in over 150 countries and the world’s largest data base of media contacts.

Their strategy has always been to work closely with their users and business partners to improve their services continuously. That way they keep high standards in terms of usability and easy access to all the latest news.

As part of this strategy they now started involving bloggers more closely than ever before by giving them the opportunity to be seen on CisionWire-articles in context with topics they blog about. Twingly supplies the technical solution.

For bloggers it means that they can blog about a topic, then link to the related press release on CisionWire, ping their post to Twingly. Their post will then automatically appear below the press release within a few minutes.

Right now, this new service is available on CisionWire.com and CisionWire.se. So go and check it out!

With now both, CisionWire and MyNewsdesk linking to blogs as part of their strategy, we consider this development a big step in terms of press services establishing a new standard of providing information by integrating news and comments from the public via social media services.

How’s your movie knowledge?

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Looking for a bit of Friday entertainment? Always wanted to challenge your colleagues with movie questions? Now you got a chance. At least if you understand Swedish. =)

We spent some time and tested Telia Filmutmaningen (“Telia Movie Challenge”). While being on the first level one might think “Booooring, this is something for kindergarten”, but latest half way through level 2 you are hooked and it can get quite tough. Once through with all 250 questions, you can post your result on Facebook or Twitter. You can also challenge your friends on Facebook and run a competition with them.

All in all one of the coolest event pages I have seen for a long time.

And you know what else is really great? You can be part of this page, too! Just blog about you results and link to Telia Filmutmaningen, ping your post to us – and then your post gets displayed on the page!

Do I really need to say that we are very proud of the fact that Telia chose us for supporting their event page?

Now, off you go, have fun with the questions, and make sure you beat the guy to the right! I couldn’t, so please take revenge for me!

//Anja Rauch

The age of transparency

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The web is making people and companies more transparent. Even though some users are concerned about losing the anonymity that they enjoyed so much during the past 20 years of online existence, the increased transparency of today’s digital world can help our society become better. And it forces people to tell the truth, since lying without getting revealed is increasingly difficult.

When I studied Business Communication from 2003 to 2006 the (marketing) world was still pretty much like in the old days. One of the basic rules we learned was that every product or service can be positioned on the market in the way you want, you just need to find the right way of communicating it. I don’t remember “transparency” being part of the curriculum, at least not as a major factor to consider when working with business communication. Apparently transparency was something Marketers and PR people didn’t need to care about too much, even though Google of course already existed – but Social Networks were still in their early days, the blogosphere just started to grow, and the rise of real time web was still a few years away.

But now, five years later, everything has changed. Every promise about a product or service can be verified or disproved online. A quick search gives consumers access to product reviews in online stores and on specific review sites, blog postings from people having used the product/service (via Twingly Blog Search for example), and of course shorter feedback like tweets or status updates (via Twingly Microblog Search). You could even use a search engine for sentiment analysis to get a quick input whether people on Twitter like the product/service or not.

Product characteristics are more transparent than every before and each company that sells poor quality products but tells everybody they are the best you can get will eventually be exposed and fail.

But transparency does not only change the way marketing and advertising work. Transparency also affects politics, on the one hand due to a new class of observers such as blogs that follow and analyse the actions taken by politicians, and on the other hand because of the wide access to information which enables everyone to make a quick fact check of things being said by politicians. Even whistle-blower sites like Wikileaks or video platforms like YouTube improve people’s access to information, both by revealing secret documents like Wikileaks did yesterday and by providing everybody with visual witness reports and other videos to past events that otherwise might have been forgotten.

Even those whose mission it is to create transparency around government’s and companies’ actions are now becoming more transparent: Journalists and Bloggers. Thanks to news aggregators and search engines like Google News, it takes a few seconds to compare what different newspapers and content sites have written about a specific topic. One can find out at a glance who published what, who quoted whom, and who didn’t correct a detail or accusation that already has been revealed as being incorrect.

Transparency forces each of us to question our own actions and behaviour. Politicians who made a big mistake, companies who praised products that turned out to be faulty and news outlets that created their own truth just to sell more papers or to get more page impressions. In the digital age they all have to fear being exposed. Everyone makes mistakes, and most people are willing to forgive – if there is a confession. But if the one responsible tries to cover up the problem, things can get ugly very quickly these days. Because there will be always someone who stumbles upon inconsistencies. And after that has happened, the documentation of it will be everywhere on the web – forever.

Sometimes the phrase “The Internet never forgets” is used to criticize the web’s capability of finding content published year’s or even decades ago. While people’s memories slowly fade away, the Internet can tell you those old memories in a detailed way is if was yesterday they happened. But even though this might become an issue for people who find photos from their wild teenage days online, in many other situations the Internet’s inability to forget is a strength.

Because the human brain also forgets things that it actually needs for making the right judgements, for evaluating people’s or companies’ actions and statements. A politician that is about to get an important role in the parliament or a company that receives a lot of positive attention for a successful CSR campaign might have a dark, flawed past. A past that both individuals and mainstream media are often good at forgetting. But Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, blogs and other sites don’t forget.

There is a flip-side to transparency, yes. But while our attitude towards questionable photos from teenage days has to change anyway, the pros of transparency might have a much bigger impact on our society than people realize. The web does not only increase the transparency of companies and public individuals with power, but it helps us to remember this kind of information that we should not but very likely would forget. And this is something that could help our society to grow and to get better.

What do you think: Is the age of transparency something rather positive or negative?

/Martin Weigert

Photo: stock.xchng

How to monitor the Social Web with Twingly

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We know that many of you are working within marketing, media, are running a company or doing freelance work. And we are pretty sure that most of you are curious to see what users are publishing about you, your company, brands or services on the Social Web.

We have a tool that might help you collecting this information. With our blog and microblogging search you can easily monitor all the things people online say about you and the products you work with. That helps you to stay in touch with your loyal customers and target groups and also gives you valuable information for improving and enhancing your offerings.

So now we explain you how to get started. It’s only 3 steps! First, we’ll show you how to monitor what people are saying about you in blogs, and then how to monitor microblogging services like Twitter.

How to monitor blogs with Twingly

1. Go to www.twingly.com and sign in with your username and password. If you don’t have a Twingly account yet, you can create one for free by clicking on “sign up”

2. Click on the link “Blog search” in the navigation bar at the top of the site (the direct address to the Blog search is www.twingly.com/search). Now, enter the keyword or keywords you want to monitor into the search field, like the name of the company you are working for or of a specific product or brand. Press “search”.

3. What you are seeing now are the results of your search, that means all the blog articles from around the web that include the keyword(s) that you entered. Above the result list you find different filters to sort the results, for example by language or date they were published. For monitoring purposes we recommend you to change the “Sort by” filter from “TwinglyRank” to “Date”

To the right you see a box with the links “Subscribe to RSS” and “Create Email Alert”.

By clicking on “Create Email Alert”, you subscribe to the specific search by email. After you have done that, we’ll send you every day one email with the latest results for the search term(s) you choose. And if you are getting tired of too many emails, you can simply click the unsubscribe link in the mail whenever you want.

If you instead prefer to subscribe to the search by RSS, click on the “Subscribe to RSS” link, copy the complete link from your browser address bar and paste it into your RSS reader of choice, like Google Reader. Every time we find a new blog post mentioning the keyword(s) you chose, you’ll get it delivered right into your RSS reader.

How to monitor Twitter and other microblogging services with Twingly

1. Go to www.twingly.com and sign in with your username and password. If you don’t have a Twingly account yet, you can create one for free by clicking on “sign up”

2. Click on the link “Microblog search” in the navigation bar at the top of the site (the direct address to the Microblog search is www.twingly.com/microblogsearch). Now, enter the keyword or keywords you want to monitor into the search field, like the name of the company you are working for or of a specific product or brand. Press “Microblog search”.

3. What you are seeing now are the results of your search, that means all the mentions of the keyword(s) that you entered. To the right you see a box with a few microblogging services that you can either include or exclude in your search. We recommend you to not uncheck the Twitter results, since this is the microblogging service with the highest user activity.

After you have decided which services to include, you can choose between subscribing to the RSS feed of that search or to create an email alert instead:

By clicking on “Create Email Alert”, you subscribe to the specific search by email. After you have done that, we’ll send you every day one email with the latest results for the search term or search terms you choose. And if you are getting tired of too many emails, you can simply click the unsubscribe link in the mail whenever you want.

If you instead want to subscribe to the search by RSS, click on the “Subscribe to RSS” link, copy the complete link from your browser address bar and paste it into your RSS reader of choice, like Google Reader. Every time there are new microblogging posts mentioning the keyword(s) you chose, you’ll get them delivered right into your RSS reader.

Some final advices

  • If you don’t get many results for your search, a reason could be that you have entered too many keywords. Try to remove one or more of the keywords.
  • There are some more advanced search queries you can use to improve the results. Have a look at them here for the Blog search and here for the Microblog search.

/Martin Weigert

How the realtime web changes the world

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At Twingly, we are big fans of the realtime web. Well, that shouldn’t come as a surprise since some of our services are built around it – like Twingly Live and Twingly Channels.

The interesting thing with the realtime web is that it is more and more becoming an integral part of the web. People are taking for granted that it is there, without thinking about it. While the term “realtime web” always has been used mainly by web enthusiasts and geeks, the idea of user generated content published in (near) realtime through platforms like Twitter, Facebook or others that allow for instant status updates and search, has spilled over into the Internet mainstream. Considering that Facebook is close to reach 500 million active users and having in mind that the social network encourages people to publish content to the public, it’s very likely that the publicly accessible realtime web is now being populated by hundreds of millions of people.

The contribution of web users all over the world to the continuous stream of information has become an important part of many people’s web usage. And search engines and services like Twitter Search, Snap Bird, OneRiot, Tweetmeme, Openbook or even Google and Bing enable anyone to tap into this realtime stream, to see what people are talking right now, which links they are sharing – yes, in fact even to get an overview about the mood of people, right now and by looking back and aggregating status updates.

While most people are aware of the new possibilities and usage patterns triggered by social networks, blogging and microblogging, I’m not sure if everyone has thought about the consequences all this could have on societies and economies.

It’s worth to take a minute and to think about the way the realtime web is changing the world. That sounds like big words, but it might not be exaggerated. The realtime web makes it possible for people to organize without formal leader. We have seen in a few non-democratic countries how Twitter was used as a tool to avoid censorship, to spread news and to inform about upcoming demonstrations and protests. With the realtime web, people can organize faster. Really fast – and as some unofficial street parties in France show, in a way that the authorities have problems to adjust. Imagine what this could mean on a bigger scale. If suddenly and without any previous planning a million people would gather on a city’s main square, after reading about it on Twitter 30 minutes before. A really big flash mob. That’s a power of the people even western societies are not used to.

I don’t want to claim that the realtime web already has made the world more democratic, but it at least has the chance to do so. And it definitely creates transparency. In any second, you can use a variety of technologies to receive people’s honest realtime feedback on products, services and events. Last time everyone could witness this was on Saturday’s final of the Eurovision Song Contest. Following the #esc hashtag on Twitter was almost more fun than watching the show.

Even if you cannot be sure that everything you read is true, the social connections between people and the way they earn trust over time by being a reliable and authentic source of information and opinion acts as a filter, ensuring that not every stupid rumour is going viral.

On the other hand, that’s not always enough. There have been so many occasions when people falsely were said to have died. Those kind of stories do not always come from Twitter or other realtime services, but rather from mainstream media and gossip sites. Still, with the realtime web, they are spreading much faster and reaching people who otherwise never would read celebrity sites or questionable tabloids.

I think it is necessary to highlight that there is a risk involved in the realtime web. A risk that the combination of global connections and weak filters can lead to misinformation’s on a large scale, which could spark unrest or even panic. Especially in a situation where a really bad news is hitting the web, not all people necessarily think about fact-checking or going to another, renowned newspaper site to get a confirmation before sharing the news. So I don’t think it is too far fetch to expect some major case of global misinformation caused by the realtime web. But that’s maybe what needs to happen to make people realize what power the realtime web gave them as a crowd. And fortunately and despite the uncertainty regarding the future of journalism, there will always be professional journalists who can correct false reports or complete incomplete information spreading on the realtime web. That’s one of the main tasks future journalists will have to work with.

Even though there are some question marks about if the realtime web in fact could cause trouble to people, in my eyes the advantages and opportunities are prevailing. More democracy and more transparency could at least in theory lead to a better and more honest world. It’s up to us to make it become real in practice, too.

/Martin Weigert

(Illustration: stock.xchng)

8 essential tools for enhancing and improving your Twitter experience

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There are tens of thousands of applications for enhancing and improving the Twitter experience. But the tricky part is to find them, since Twitter does not offer an app store. App discovery is definitely one of Twitter’s Achilles heels. To make it easier for you, here is a selection of 8 browser applications everyone who is using Twitter, both for private or professional purpose, might enjoy. These are – apart from Twitter clients that we don’t focus on in this post – pretty essential tools that help you to use Twitter in a more efficient, effective and fun way.

Feel free to let us know in the comments which Twitter apps you wouldn’t want to live without.

Snap Bird
Snap Bird is an incredibly useful Twitter search engine. Yes, Twitter has its own search, but for some reason it doesn’t let you search through tweets that are older than a week or so. This is where Snap Bird has its strength: It let’s you search through the complete Twitter timeline of any Twitter user, either yourself or others. Furthermore you can search through all the tweets that were directed to you, through all the direct messages you sent and those you received. For each search you make you get a permanent link in case you want to show the results to somebody else. Snap Bird is a great tool, especially for those people who use Twitter to “bookmark” their thoughts and links, and who want to find that specific URL they posted on Twitter in summer 2009.

ManageFlitter
Formerly known as ManageTwitter, this tool is your ultimate follower manager for Twitter. After connecting to your personal account, you can use ManageFlitter to get a list of the people you follow based on a bunch of different criteria. You can see at a glance who of those people is not following you back, doesn’t have a profile picture, hasn’t tweeted for a long time, has a posting frequency far higher than the average or is unusually quiet. And for all those criteria, the service allows for bulk or selective unfollowing. You could either choose to unfollow everyone who does not follow you back, or just a few of them, for example.

Bettween
Even if that’s not recommended, sometimes two people have some kind of longer conversation on Twitter, packaged in a couple of 140 character tweets. That might be boring for you, or it might be a really interesting exchange of thoughts. If the latter is the case, you maybe would want to show the discussion in your blog and comment on it, or you are one of the two people involved in the Twitter conversation and would like to publish it somewhere else. Bettween helps you with that. You just enter the names of the two Twitter users and Bettween presents you with a threaded view of the conversation including a permanent link. You could also create a screenshot of the conversation to embed it on an external site.

Trendrr
If you are working in the media, marketing or web business, chances are good that you are interested in statistics surrounding specific keywords on Twitter. Trendrr is a great free service for this purpose. You enter a keyword and Trendrr then gives you a variety of graphs and analytics regarding the keyword, for example the number of tweets containing the word over a specific time period. Trendrr also tracks other platforms like Facebook, Last.fm and Delicious. Every search is visualized and offered as widget to embed on any external site. Really useful!

Klout
It’s not a secret that people on Twitter like to compare themselves to other users, to see how much influence they have, how many people they reach with their tweets and so on. Most Twitter users are vain. Klout helps them to live that out. After you have entered a Twitter username, the service does some algorithm and analytics magic and shows you some figures and statistics about the influence of that respective user. The main figure is the “Klout Score”, a measurement of an user’s overall online influence on Twitter. Of course, this is nothing that you can go around and tell everyone, since no one really knows how relevant the Klout Score in the end actually is. But for all users active on Twitter it could be interesting to see how much influence Klout thinks they actually have, and how they compare to their peers.

TweetStats
You want to know if you used Twitter more heavily half a year ago? Or which day of the week you publish most tweets? Or what time of the day you are most likely not to tweet? Then you should check out TweetStats, because this tool tells you all this, and even a little bit more, visualized in useful and easy to understand graphs. It’s a lot of fun and might tell you some surprising background about your personal Twitter behaviour.

Twingly Live
At Twingly we are very humble, which is why we mention our own Twingly Live service only in the end of this list. Imagine there is some specific event or keyword you would like to monitor and to see what people are saying about it on Twitter. But you don’t want to refresh the Twitter search all the time, you want to see the results in real time, AND you want to embed this as a widget into any blog or website. Twingly Live let’s you do exactly this. Click here, create your Twingly Live channel for a specific keyword or hashtag, and you are set. It’s really easy.

Google Reader (or any other RSS feed)
You are probably wondering how Google Reader (or any other RSS reader you are using) has made it onto this list. Yes, it is no real Twitter tool. And still, any RSS reader can help you to improve your Twitter experience and to help you monitor what’s being said on Twitter. It’s easy and very efficient: Go the the Twitter search and enter your Twitter username. On the result page, get the RSS feed URL and subscribe to it in Google Reader. For some reason, most Twitter clients don’t show you all the replies and retweets you are getting. Why is unclear, but a useful work around is to subscribe to the feed with your username in Google Reader or other RSS readers. By doing that you will get all the @replies and retweets for your username, and you can be sure to not miss anything anymore. Of course you can subscribe to any other keyword or phrase you would like to monitor in the RSS reader of your choice.

/Martin Weigert