Centauri's Thoughts

Its now been almost 20 days since I opened a Twitter account. A lot has happened in this (somewhat short) timeframe.

In addition to some real time news about the ISS today (they had to stay in the Soyuz module, because of a possible space debris hit), there has been a LOT of chatter since Ellen DeGeneres has discovered twitter.
On Monday, Diddy explained it to her (sort of) on her show, and by today, she has an account set up and is trying for a million followers (She has more than 92,000 as of this post).

The clip of the show with Diddy got her interested and todays show said this.

There are a number of celebrities on twitter, but Ellen talking about it on her show and trying to get a million followers might make a huge increase in people very quickly. Not just for her, like most twitter users, they will begin to wonder “what else is out there?” and start exploring and finding things on their own.

In answer to that, I have been following some interesting tools to make using twitter more interesting, and a fair number of them come from Chris Pirillo

Chris lists a top 10, and 10 more, of those, I'll be listing the ones I find the most interesting plus a few I have found via other tweeters:

#1 Monitter
Hands down winner to me for real time. you have a default of 3 keywords to follow and that can be increased or decreased.

#2 twitscoop.com
An awesome way to see whats hot and trending, it even has graphs showing activity by the hour, (it showed todays spike about the space station)

#3 TweeTake
Allows you to make a local save of followers, friends, tweets, direct messages, or everything.

#4 twitpwr.com
Produces a tag cloud from the bio's of those you follow

For completeness, I include both of Chris Pirillo's lists

10 Twitterific tools

10 MORE must have twitter tools

Check them out, because we all have different uses for twitter, and what might not be of critical interest to me, might be just what you wanted!