You're on Twitter, right? If you're not, you should probably check it out. If you are, you already know that the thing that makes Twitter valuable, powerful and useful (other than the large and growing network of people who use it, of course) is the wide range of third party applications that extend its functionality. Of course, not every Twitter service is all business-business-business. Here are a couple of relatively new apps that seem to be a bit more frivolous but are worth playing with nonetheless.
The first is My First Tweet, from Noah Brier (who caught some buzz earlier this year with Brand Tags.) When the site works -- it's still a bit buggy as of this post -- you can use any Twitterer's handle to see exactly when they lobbed their own variant of "trying out twitter" (because, yeah, that's how most of us started) into the ether. If nothing else, My First Tweet is an interesting way to understand just how nerdy you and your friends really are, based on how early you jumped onto the tweet-wagon. Oops - did I say nerdy? I meant 'just how leading edge'...
But the service I'm addicted to right now is Twitter Grader, from HubSpot. Grader rates and ranks Twitter users based on follower count, the influence of those followers, how often they tweet, the completeness of their Twitter profile and some other black magic mumbo jumbo. Top Twitterers are then rolled up into geo-specific lists of Twitter Elite -- I've variously been Twitter Elite on Long Island, in New York NY and nowhere at all, depending on what my profile says on any given day. Hmmm... I don't feel elite -- but I guess that incessently blurting out 140 character status updates really is worth something after all.
Play around and let me know what you think.
