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As Twitter continues to grow at an incredible pace each day, the importance of the platform grows with it. Developing a strong social media presence and growing your network of followers demands being active on Twitter. Fortunately, there exist many tools out there that assist us in making our life easier and more efficient on Twitter.

Here are ten tools that will increase your efficiency, while allowing you to retain your genuine personality when tweeting.

1. Buffer – Never Flood Your Followers Again
Buffer

Full Disclosure: I work on Buffer.

Buffer is an App that allows you to tweet more of the great content you come across each day, without overwhelming your followers. Via one of the browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) you can “Buffer” any article as a Tweet that you come across. Instead of being posted immediately, all these tweets will be tweeted well spaced out over the day.

Best bit: To understand more about what your followers like, you will receive analytics about clicks, retweets and reach for every Tweet Buffered.

2. StrawberryJ.am – Read top news from Twitter only
StrawberryJ.am

Another very innovative new appearance is an app called Strawberryj.am. The App takes all Tweets from your stream and provides you with only the most relevant ones to read. It does that based on most mentioned links from your friends. This means all clutter not providing value for your timeline is filtered out. You can see at one glance which news are most discussed and retweet interesting ones right from there.

Best bit: The best part here is the handy daily digest update, which sends top news straight to your inbox.

3. TwentyFeet – Google Analytics for your Twitter account
TwentyFeet

TwentyFeet is a very handy analytics App, allowing you to track all happenings related to your Twitter account. The App shows you easy to understand graphs of your mentions, retweets and follower increases over time. It automatically notifies you with any abnormal changes in these stats, so you can check on whether your Twitter efforts are actually making an impact.

Best bit: It comes in very handy that you can also connect your Facebook and Youtube accounts in order to track analytics from these social networks too.

4. KeepStream – Create beautiful collections of Tweets
KeepStream

KeepStream basically does what it says. You can take Tweets from your timeline and create a specific collection with them. This allows you to archive some of your favorite tweets, or simply create a transcript form a Twitterchat or conference you have been following. Conveniently, the App creates a preview of the links in Tweets and also offers you easy ways to order the tweets for your needs.

Best bit: A great feature is that the App offers you to embed a collection as a blog post or publish it as a public page you can share and comment on.

5. Proxlet – Mute Twitter Noise
Proxlet

Proxlet is a fantastic App that allows you to filter out unnecessary Tweets from your native Twitter stream. To me, this means I can get rid of paper.li, Foursquare and other services showing up in my timeline, which I don’t consider adding enough value. You can also mute individual users or hashtags, which is helpful if there is a conference or Twitterchat going on that you don’t want to be part of.

Best bit: On top of being available for Twitter.com, the App also ties in with other Twitter clients, such as TweetDeck, Twitter for iPhone and Twitdroyd.

6. Commun.it – Track your network
Commun.it

This is another very innovative discovery I have started to use recently. The App shows you which people amongst your followers are the most engaged, which are supporters and which are influencers. You can then go and specifically engage more with these members or extend your network beyond your core followers.

Best bit: The impressive part is that the App also suggests you leads, based on the links in your bio, tracking Tweets from people mentioning there, which aren’t following you.

7. Triberr – The Reach multiplier for Bloggers
Triberr

This is an App that can come in very handy if you are maintaining an active blog. You can group together with other bloggers and if anyone of you publishes a new post, all members will retweet it automatically. In order to prevent Spam, the platform is invite only, but well worth checking out. You can create multiple groups, or tribes as they are called, and also get to know others relevant to your niche.

Best bit: What I like most is the fact that the App provides you with complete stats on the amount of clicks you are getting from each of your fellow group members, so you can refine tribes easily.

8. Tweepi – Easy unfollowing of unwanted followers
Tweepi

In order to get a great discussion going, it can often happen that we start following people without much consideration. If we realize later that there are now a few people that aren’t really suited for following, it can be a pain to get rid of them. With Tweepi, you can easily see which people you are following are inactive, not following you back, or simply tweeting too much. You can unfollow them with just a few clicks.

Best bit: I found it very handy to see that the App also offers you the functionality to reciprocate following people you haven’t been following.

9. Twylah – Fanpages for your Twitter Account
Twylah

This is a new App that I soon found helpful after using it for a few weeks. If you sign up, Twylah will create a customized fanpage for you, displaying your tweets according to topics you most Tweet about. For a more engaged experience, the App shows previews of links, including videos and slideshares, as well as pictures on your Twylah page. It is a fantastic place to point others towards, if they want to see what you are most tweeting about.

Best bit: There is an amazing functionality called “Power Tweet” that will enable you to post special preview links of your tweets, that are surrounded by lots of highly relevant related content.

10. Tweriod – Start Tweeting when others listen
Tweriod

Tweriod is an App that analyses your Tweeting and in return gives you two simple graphs, suggesting the best time to Tweet. While it isn’t the first App providing you with optimized Tweeting times, it is the one with the most thought-out algorithm to get to results for you. The App takes into account both the impact of your past tweets and also the ones from all your followers.
Best bit: What I like best is the convenience of the service, you simple sign in with Twitter and the App then DM’s you the results once the report is finished.

Organizing Your Twitter Life
Making use of these Apps has helped me to organize my Twitter life in a less cluttered way. The fact that many of thee apps aim to facilitate your workflow with great design is a big plus on the usability.

How about you? Do you think some of these Apps could be useful for you too? I would love to hear your thoughts about them below.

I wrote a little while back about my feelings on hash-bang URLs:

I feel so disappointed and sad when I see previously-robust URLs swapped out for the fragile #! fragment identifiers. I find it hard to articulate my sadness…

Fortunately, Mike Davies is more articulate than I. He’s written a detailed account of breaking the web with hash-bangs.

It would appear that hash-bang usage is on the rise, despite the fact that it was never intended as a long-term solution. Instead, the pattern (or anti-pattern) was intended as a last resort for crawling Ajax-obfuscated content:

So the #! URL syntax was especially geared for sites that got the fundamental web development best practices horribly wrong, and gave them a lifeline to getting their content seen by Googlebot.

Mike goes into detail on the Gawker outage that was a direct result of its “sites” being little more than single pages that require JavaScript to access anything.

I’m always surprised when I come across as site that deliberately chooses to make its content harder to access.

Though it may not seem like it at times, we’re actually in a pretty great position when it comes to front-end development on the web. As long as we use progressive enhancement, the front-end stack of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is remarkably resilient. Remove JavaScript and some behavioural enhancements will no longer function, but everything will still be addressable and accessible. Remove CSS and your lovely visual design will evaporate, but your content will still be addressable and accessible. There aren’t many other platforms that can offer such a robust level of loose coupling.

This is no accident. The web stack is rooted in Postel’s law. If you serve an HTML document to a browser, and that document contains some tags or attributes that the browser doesn’t understand, the browser will simply ignore them and render the document as best it can. If you supply a style sheet that contains a selector or rule that the browser doesn’t recognise, it will simply pass it over and continue rendering.

In fact, the most brittle part of the stack is JavaScript. While it’s far looser and more forgiving than many other programming languages, it’s still a programming language and that means that a simple typo could potentially cause an entire script to fail in a browser.

That’s why I’m so surprised that any front-end engineer would knowingly choose to swap out a solid declarative foundation like HTML for a more brittle scripting language. Or, as Simon put it:

Gizmodo launches redesign, is no longer a website (try visiting with JS disabled): http://gizmodo.com/

Read Mike’s article, re-read this article on URL design and listen to what John Resig has to say in this interview .

Tagged with
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Meet Jill. Jill is in the market to buy a reasonable quality digital SLR. She’s fed up with her point-and-shoot camera and wants something a little more sophisticated. However Jill doesn’t want to rush into a purchase as digital SLR’s are not cheap. Instead she has been researching the options online.

Video

Eventually she discovers a video review on YouTube for camera that looks perfect. The video has been produced by a company called “Professional Cameras”. The review was very thorough and provided her with all the information she required.

Search Engine Optimisation

Once settled on which camera to get Jill searches Google to find the best price. Among the search engine results she sees “Professional Cameras” again. They are not the cheapest, but because she was so impressed by the video she decides to take a look at their site.

The website

The website was incredibly useful. It was well-designed, easy-to-use, and answered all the questions she had about purchasing from “Professional Cameras”. However by this stage Jill was keen to get her hands on her new camera and didn’t want to wait for it to be delivered. She decided she was willing to pay a bit extra to buy it from her local Currys. She got in her car and drove into town.

Mobile website

Much to her disappointment none of her local shops stocked the particular camera she wanted. However she remembered that the “Professional Cameras” website said something about next day delivery for a small additional charge. Although there were other cameras in Currys she didn’t want to settle for second best. So while still in store she used her iPhone to connect to the “Professional Cameras” website. She was delighted to find that they had an easy-to-use mobile version of their site that made it incredibly straightforward for her to place an order. Within 2 minutes she was done and the camera was due to arrive next day.

Support forum

Jill excitedly waiting for the camera to be delivered the next day. As promised it arrived on time and she was over the moon. She spent most of the day out snapping pictures, but when she returned home that evening she discovered a problem. Unfortunately no matter how much she tried she could not get the camera to transfer photographs to her computer.

In desperation Jill returned to the “Professional Cameras” website and visited the support forum looking for help. Unfortunately she couldn’t find the answer she wanted and because it was outside business hours she was unable to contact the supplier.

Social media monitoring

In her frustration she posted a tweet expressing her dissatisfaction with “Professional Cameras” even though she knew that it probably was not their fault. She was just so disappointed.

On logging in the following morning Jill discovered that somebody from “Professional Cameras” had responded to her tweet apologising for the problem and suggesting that she either calls customer services or uses the live chat facility on their website.

Customer services

Jill decided to use the live chat feature because she hated talking on the phone. She was blown away by the customer service she received. They offered to replace the camera no questions asked. However they suggested that a software update may solve the problem. Using the features built into the live chat they took her to the appropriate page and showed her how to download the drivers. This solved the problem and Jill went awayhappy.

An ongoing relationship

Jill was so impressed by the service she received from “Professional Cameras” that she decided to like their Facebook page and tell her friends about the excellent service she had been given. Most importantly when she received future e-mails from the company suggesting alternative products that she might wish to consider she was not so quick to consign them to her junk folder. In fact it turns out that the e-mails she received were incredibly targeted and suggested a number of excellent accessories and provided her with tips on how to get the most out of her new camera.

The moral of the story

So why do I tell you the story of Jill? It is to demonstrate that users online relationship with a company extends far beyond the website. More importantly it is vital that the different aspects which make up this online relationship work well together. Traditionally website owners have employed a web designer to build their site, an SEO company for their search engine rankings and marketing people to deal with social media and e-mail. However often this can lead to a fragmented approach.

If we are really to provide customers with an exceptional user experience it is vitally important that we provide a unified experience which involves the various specialists working together in extremely close relationship. It is time to look beyond the website and see the larger picture that makes up a great user experience.

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