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For a while it seemed as if building a third-party application for Twitter was a route to instant fortune (as were Facebook apps before it, and iPhone apps after it). But judging by the eventual sale of Twitter link tracker and aggregator Twitturly, it appears that bubble may now have burst.

Since launching in April 2008, rivals such as Tweetmeme and Topsy have joined the Twitter aggregator space – and when founder Joel Strellner put the site up for auction, just 5 bids came in, with a final price of ‘no more than $8,500′ (HT Techcrunch).

Having said that, Strellner has moved onto other things, leaving the site with a Google PR of 6, Alexa ranking of 40,106, and most importantly, only around 1000 Unique Users per day. And less than 1000 visitors per day definitely doesn’t get the big bucks.

Twitturly

The only thing I can’t understand is why there wasn’t more effort to boost PR and visitor numbers immediately prior to the sale? Then again, the auction details reveal Strellner is working full time, didn’t want to invest more in costs (the EC2 server costs were apparently around $3k per month), and has also recently found his free time taken away by becoming a father (Something which I can totally understand!)

It will be interesting to see whether the new owner can make use of the 622GB data, the agreement to access the Summize (Twitter Search) API an unlimited amount, and a site which claimed 5000 UUs per day.

If you want to find the most popular brands on Twitter in terms of mentions, you could spend some time setting up various monitoring systems. Or you can just go to TweetedBrands and see which 50 companies are getting the most mentions in any one day.

It’s simple and effective for a quick overview, and each mention number links to the appropriate Twitter search.

TweetedBrands

And that’s about it, other than to say it was produced as part of the 24 hour business camp.

I may have already written about Twitter lists, but certainly the interest in them hasn’t started to wane yet.

In addition to everyone and their blogging dog creating posts on the lists you really, definitely, absolutely should follow,  Mark Drapeau has an interesting post on O’Reilly Radar, in which he puts forward the idea that Twitter lists are a more organic metric than the number of followers/RTs an individual has.

Meanwhile the two rivals for most comprehensive Twitter client, Tweetdeck and Seesmic, have both revealed the imminent inclusion of list functionality:

‘While we’re not saying exactly how we’re integrating lists just yet – hey, we all need a few secrets! – be happy in the knowledge that we are integrating lists into TweetDeck. And as you would expect, we’re not just planning any old run-of-the mill integration…oh no. We think you’ll find that what we have planned for Lists is going to take your social media experience with TweetDeck to new heights.’ - Tweetdeck blog.

‘OF COURSE Seesmic will have user lists very soon. I have them on my Seesmic Desktop already testing.’ – Seesmic founder @Loic on Twitter.

I’m convinced Twitter lists will remain a highly important change for Twitter, both for users, and for monetisizing the business.

If you’re looking to publish any RSS feeds to a Twitter account, then apparently you wouldn’t be alone in picking Twitterfeed, as it’s apparently used by nearly 350,000 publishers.

Not only was it around the first default choice, but there are a host of changes now going live to improve the service.

If you publish on a system that offers PubSubHubbub feeds (e.g. Blogger or Typepad), your new posts should be live on Twitter in a matter of moments.

It now also features the option to publish to Facebook, which makes life a little easier.

And you get better analytics – there’s now integration with both url shortner Bit.ly, and Google Analytics.

And behind the scenes there’s an improved queue management system for greater reliability.

In fact, my only complain from a personal note is that the new design and system gives a variety of methods to log-in, and for some reason I’m struggling with mine!

One of the most popular Twitter clients, Tweetdeck, has added new features in the latest release,  version 0.31. It’s pushing forward as one of only two Twitter clients with a share of over 10%, as measured by Twitstats.

Included in the latest release is a new notification system which can be applied to certain groups. Plus it also has inline reply, retweets and direct messages inside the notification menu.

A major feature you might not notice is that Tweetdeck has now been optimised to consume less memory, which is good for everyone – plus there’s also the time-saving option of keyboard shortcuts, and a Heads-Up Display.

And depending on how popular you are, you might find the feature to view your newest 100 followers comes in useful as you can directly follow, block or add to a group.

Check oout the video below for the official walk-through:

Humanity has always loved creating lists to provide context for things, and the Twitter universe is no exception.

Whether it’s the suggested user list for new users of the service, the Twitter List function which has recently been announced and will arrive soon, or the huge variety of third-party lists created for almost every topic (e.g. People in UK Radio – I’ve slipped down the list slightly!)

But if you want to create a list quickly and easily to monitor, and don’t fancy waiting around for Twitter itself, then Mixtweet provides a good solution.

Mixtweet

It allows you to create mixes from your friends, your timelines or other peoples mixes, and you don’t need to be following people to add them. And once the list is created, you can embed it as a widget wherever you fancy.

You can also view multiple ‘mixes’ via the site, with real-time updates and the ability to clip any update for later reading, and founder Michael Wu has said that Mixtweet lists will be made compatible with Twitter Lists when their API becomes available.

Mixtweet List View

It also users OAuth to access your account, so minimising any safety risk, or you can create a log-in via the site itself. All in all, a really nice service – although you may wonder what their plan will be once Twitter Lists become available, that doesn’t seem to be a reason to avoid using them in the meantime.

The ultimate guide to Twitter applications has been an idea many people have had. In fact, I even blogged about trying to start one with other Twitter bloggers back in January. But now Laura Fitton (@pistachio) and an engineering team have unveiled oneforty (no relation!) which is effectively the Twitter version of the iPhone app store.

Sign in with OAuth, and you can fill out your profile, including listing your favourite Tweeters etc. The site will automatically list any applications it picks up from your account – and then you can start finding and adding any others that it might have missed.

badgergravling on oneforty

There’s a curated list of Essential Applications, Most Popular, and the ability to suggest apps that may have been missed. Developers can list and claim their applications, add screenshots and reviews etc, and members of oneforty can then rate and review any application they wish.

Laura is also the Principal of Pistachio Consulting, which concentrates on microblogging, and the author of Twitter for Dummies. So she knows her stuff.

Backing-up your stuff is never a back idea, although there’s some debate over whether to choose the cloud or a local harddrive. But if the cloud’s your choice, then there’s a new company to add with BackupMy.Net.

You get to save emails, blogs, pictures, and most importantly here, Twitter.  It’s relatively fast, and you can download your tweets in HTML, JSON or XML format.

If you want to ask them a question directly, obviously they’re on Twitter as @backupmymail (not backupmytwitter?)

It’s free to back up your Tweets, no password is required, and their own counter is claiming close to 3 million Tweets are already protected.

The main concern that has been highlighted so far has been ReadWriteWeb pointing out that it auto-Tweets on your behalf.

If you want to go beyond sharing text, pictures or audio on Twitter, you can not only share videos with Twitvid, but even upload from your iPhone 3GS with their new mobile application.

That’s in addition to their earlier integration into popular iPhone Twitter app Twitterfon.

Alternatively the site itself allow you to upload a video file or capture your webcam, tag people, tweet it, and also send to Youtube at the same time.

There’s also an API available.

Want to find Twitter users to follow? There are already a fair number of directories out there, but Followformation offers a slightly different approach.

Whereas Twellow, WeFollow or Just Tweet It display lists for users to explore and manually add followers, you can now select your area of interest, and automatically follow the Top 10 to Top 50 people listed on followformation.

The rankings within each area of interest, e.g. Sports, or Social Media, are all defined by follower counts, so essentially you’re just grabbing the most-followed people who have an interest in their profile.

The only people I can see getting much value from the service are new users, as it’s at least slightly more relevant than the Suggested User List.

I’ve played around with numerous Twitter analytics and statistic applications, and I have to say that Twitter Analyzer seems to be about the most comprehensive in terms of available information.

It features:-

User stats:- including number of tweets, reach, hashtags, popularity,etc etc.

Friends stats:- including f0llowers growth rate, location, activity and re-tweeting, etc.

Mentions:- including all, social, updates, etc.

Groups:- including by occupation, join date, gender, etc.

And Trends and Fun tabs are apparently ‘coming soon’.

It’s fast after the initial username analysis, and nicely presented, with handy graphs and charts. The biggest flaws currently are that you don’t seem to be able to export the charts and graphs to anywhere else (although there’s a handy ‘Tweet’ option for some of the interesting information you might want to share via Twitter.

It also seems to be limited to the 30 days for a lot of the information, in line with the data and limits that Twitter has. Which is understandable, but also frustrating. If they were able to pull data in on a regular schedule to provide longer timeframes once a username has first been indexed, and enable the ability to export the information for presentations and spreadsheets, it would be a clear leader in Twitter stats and analysis.

Congratulations to Cesare Rocchi, the developer behind the Posty client for microblogging (I interviewed Cesare about Posty back in September last year). Posty is an Adobe Air application which offers a simple interface.
It seems I’m not the only one to have appreciated Posty, as Cesare is an Adobe student rep for Rich Internet Applications, and he submitted Posty to the RIA application content – and won!