twitter

Twitter is one of the most popular expressions of the social media boom. Though a very limited "micro-blogging" format -- where speakers are limited to messages that are no more than 140 characters in length -- it has become extremely popular, particularly with early adopters and people who spend a great deal of time online. As someone interested in marketing, I find Twitter to be a way to tap into the buzz from social-minded, technologically-friendly Internet users. Gauging that buzz can be a challenge.

In the course of preparing this year's Open Source CMS Market Share Report, I've spent a fair amount of time researching Twitter as a means of judging buzz and popularity. As a result of that I have bookmarked quite a few tools that I found useful. In this post I share what I've found -- perhaps it will save you some time.

There are 23 tools here, organized topically as follows:

• Primary Sources - slicing the message data directly from Twitter
• Geo-Tracking - tools to find Tweets by location
• Real Time Monitoring - step up and grab the information firehose
• Re-Tweeting Activity - find out who is republishing what
• Trending Topics & URLs - what's hot now and in the recent past
• User Influence - identify the most influential users and their posts