Ever since Twitter was launched in the latter half of 2006, it has grown from a small niche network to an incredibly popular one with millions of users who utilize the service to communicate with friends, broadcast events, and share breaking news. As many people claim, Twitter is a phenomenon.

But that’s not all you see of Twitter. Twitter has enabled developers to go wild building applications that can utilize the service for just about any possible type of activity. Brian Solis has written a comprehensive guide of the many tools available to enhance your branding, whether as an individual or as a company. In his post Twiter Tools for Community and Communications Professionals, Brian shares the following tools: Twubble, GroupTweet, Twitt(url)y, TwitLinks, TweetDeck, Grijit , TweetLater, Twist, Who Should I Follow?, Twitter Twerp Scan, Twemes, #hashtags, TweetScan, twInfluence, TwitterGrader, Twittertise, Twitteriffic, twhirl,TwitterWhere, TweetBeep, TwitterFeed, TwitDir, Ping.fm, Brightkite, TwitterLocal, TwitPic, SnapTweet, DoesFollow, FollowCost, Qwitter, Twittelator, Twitterfon, Twinkle, and Twitterberry.  (Yeah, pretty exhaustive.  Can you really believe that there are more?!)

What’s in your Twitter tools arsenal, and which of these is your favorite? Share them in the comments.

Rafe Needleman/CNET’s Webware review of Present.ly finds several advantages over Yammer for enterprise microsharing. Present.ly:

• supports file attachments
• permits groups
• does not require all users to share an email domain
• can be installed behind the firewall
• supports the Twitter API

Twitter API support is significant. Many tools that work with Twitter would be very useful to have for an internal version.

Rafe dislikes the email domain requirement for Yammer: “it makes it impossible to invite an outside contractor into a work group.” That’s easily solved by issuing an alias from your company’s email domain. Possibly more of a problem is that many companies have divergent sets of email domains (by brand, by business unit, or with different TLDs such as .com vs. .co.uk).

On the other hand, the ad-hoc, sign-yourself-up nature of Yammer fosters spontaneous adoption and use of the tool, which may later help employees “sell the concept” of microsharing and demonstrate microsharing’s value to decisionmakers. On the other hand, it may piss off IT departments enough to inhibit subscription growth.

Keep an eye on the TouchBase blog for our side-by-side comparison of all publicly announced enterprise microsharing tools.

(Via Chris Brogan.)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Yammer: A ‘Twitter for the enterprise’ (Rafe Needleman/Webware.com)
• TC50: Yammer launches as a Twitter for businesses, unless you want the open-source version

View from the conference venue
in Ouchy: Image via WikipediaI gave a talk this morning in Lausanne at Stephanie Booth’s Going Solo conference for freelancers.

Stowe Boyd live-twittered the talk. Suw Charman-Anderson blogged amazingly complete notes, and Urs Gattiker wrote this post about the principles covered. Jaap Stronks is liveblogging the entire day using CoverItLive.

The slide deck is below:

| View | Upload your own

Big thank you to Stephanie and all of the attendees. We had a really enjoyable discussion (see Suw’s post for detailed notes on the Q & A also.)

(If you would like to follow these folks on Twitter: Stephanie is @stephtara, Stowe is @stoweboyd, Suw is @suw, Urs is @commetrics, Jaap is @Jaapstronks.)

UPDATE: Video of the presentation itself is already live. Wow, conference video guy! Thanks.

So, I’m bouncing around Startup Weekend Boulder2 all weekend streaming, tweeting, recording & hosting as much social media as we can usefully create. There is a method to the madness. We want to bring anyone in the world into the Startup Weekend experience and let them actually engage with the live event and share their ideas.

It’s taking the lifecasting model, applying it to a live event, and incuding one hell of a return-path. We want the “audience” to actually become “remote participants.” Heck, our virtual team has even asked for their own project for the weekend already

Please check out www.mediacasters.tv for the full story.

I’ll post more thoughtfully later on what I think (hope?) the significance of this experiment might be…

(aka: Tools for Parsing Your Twitter Idea Farm)
Here are some Twitter applications I’d LOVE to use. The more I think about how friggin powerful Twitter has been in my life, the more I want to be able to dig back into Twitter streams and scoop out potentially useful chunks.

Do any of these tools exist already? Can you build them? PLEASE let me know. Laura at PistachioConsulting (dot) com. Note, this is not a wishlist for Twitter itself, but ideas for tools & apps in the Twitter ecosystem.

If I were super clever, I’d describe each function in 140 characters or less, wouldn’t I? Sorry.

Download. Twitter is cool, Ev & Sara were a pleasure to meet. I trust & love you the company. BUT. I want my complete database to play with and have as a backup.

Search. I want to search my entire Twitter stream (but just mine or just X’s) to extract stuff by keyword and or thread. Bonus points if the tool threads possible responses, repeats, etc. that may have rippled through Twitter. Using the timestamp, follower status, @reply function and/or keywords could help make that threading possible, couldn’t it?

Import/export. This would give a clean way to pull a mass of Tweets out of a twitterstream and into a text document. I’d use this, for ex., after LeWeb to harvest conference “notes” including session notes, mini conversations, who I met, etc. Sure I can use a search tool to collect all the tweets, but the copy/paste from that is a big old mess. I just want the clean text, please.

Keyword “Notes.” Combining the first two, search and extract, I can quickly pull notes on everything I’ve ever tweeted with “present*” in it. I’d examine how my ideas in a topic change over time, or pull notes for an article, blog post or book chapter fast and easily.

Followee extract (by time period). Another conference fantasy. If I meet someone at a conference I would like to get to know better, I add them on Twitter (and/or plead with them to try it out, so that I can add them.) Would love to arrive home, pull and export the list of people I added in a certain time period.

Command line interface. I want my socnets and social tools/applications (open social, anyone?) to be easily addressed from Twitter. Ex: Dopplr. I book a trip. I tweet @Dopplr Paris, France 9 Dec 2007 to 13 Dec 2007. My Dopplr updates. Dopplr could send me DMs too, when there was relevant outbound info.

Point is, I get to use YOUR app right at “home” where I live (in Twitter). It’s less work for me. Hint: if your social app is less work for me, there’s a better chance I’ll use it. This is also a non-Twitter idea because the same thing can work via SMS and email. Give me a low attention investment & high utility return and I’m yours.

@erator. Analytics tool built along the same lines as TweeterBoard, except it examines your twitter archive for the ideas that got the most responses. (It could factor in which tweets got favorited too.) Includes a “scaling” variable so that if you got 4 responses to a tweet when you had 100 followers, that has the same weight as 40 responses with 1000. Otherwise your earliest ideas get automatically discounted.

[Favorited?: Tell me if any of my tweets, and which ones, have ever been starred as favorites. By whom? This must already exist, right?] Since I drafted this Favotter by @ono_matope has surfaced. Yay @mdy for letting me know. Tool doesn’t scale yet, only tracks the “top 950″ by number of their tweets that have been starred.

Groups. I know there are some hacks for this. Rounding 1,000 followers in Paris made me sit up and take notice on this issue. I need ways to keep a closer eye on closer connections without losing any voices that might have something to say. The days of “keeping up” with peoples’ tweets are long gone, and I can go weeks without “seeing” folks I truly care about because I care about so many. Halp!

Group Twitter streams. @Kosso has an excellent hack from Gnomedex & PodCamp, and he was kind enough to do it again for @peaple, but the buggy Twitter RSS streams can throw it off. The idea is that an account is set up that anyone in the group can post to. It’s supremely powerful as a tool at an event or conference.

Amazon Gets Into MMO-Powered Crowdsourcing - GigaOM

I found this really interesting. Amazon, whose tools for surfacing, associating and recommending content (products) fascinate me, is pulling in incentives from the MMOG world to encourage its “experts” community to assist other shoppers.

To me Amazon is way ahead of other players in establishing and developing the kind of socially-mediated marketplace that I envision for the future.

Wagner James Au explains:

With Askville, users who provide helpful answers are given virtual gold as they rise in status (called “levels”) — two metrics familiar to anyone who’s ever played massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft. Questville will take this to its logical conclusion, offering adventures and Quest Coins to helpful Askville users. With a game like WoW, you become more powerful by killing monsters and completing fantastic tasks; with Questville, you’ll get virtual rewards for providing helpful real-world information.

Think about it: how can businesses of the future encourage their communities to “invest all that time, ability and creativity” that goes into gaming into helping people source and buy the things that they truly want and need.

PS: Alice Taylor of Gaming blog Wonderland got the hat tip and had this delightful quote: “We humans are such reward-oriented critters, aren’t we!”

(Via I am so sorry but I forget who tweeted the link .)