5th Week of Class: Tricking out Twitter

So there are a lot of Twitter Apps out there. Some are meant to let you use Twitter along with something else and other are meant to enhance Twitter itself. Ones that caught my eye:

TwitterAnalyzer: the description for the app says that it is sometimes called "Google Analytics for Twitter users". With over 50+ statistics measures I can see many organizations wanting to use this. In addition to some demographic info they're always looking for they can also see how often they're mentioned on Twitter and who's talking about them. A business like Pizza Hut could direct message someone a coupon because they've tweeted about having pizza delivered for the 50th time.

FitClick Diet Tweets: You send it a tweet of the food you ate and it will track the food and the calories in it. It can also track protein, fat, carbohydrates, etc. but it looks like only the calorie counter and food diary are free. It seems like an easier way of tracking that than carrying around a journal or waiting until you get home to enter it into a Word or Excel file. Frankly, I'm curious about how much food they can actually do calorie counts for. It takes 5 minutes though, so you can get instant gratification for curiousity's sake.

JustBought.it: Share photos and tweets about your purchases. While I'm not dying to go out and announce where I live and shop with everyone on the planet I can see this being used to help people find out which bookstore still has a certain textbook or other hard to find items. I can also see people on Ravlery using this to talk about yarn purchases. Many of us already photograph all the yarn we buy anyway.

Tweet what you Spend: Like FitClick the appeal is the ability to track the details of a certain event away from home without using pen and paper. In this case the event is spending cash. There is also an app to help you sort and categorize your cash spending. If I were to use this (see above description on why I might not be keen on that) I'd use it to make a separate tool I use to track spending more accurate.

Weatherizer: Changes the background of your Twitter home page based on your local weather. While it doesn't have many different possibilities for what it could be used for I think this is nifty. Windows ME had desktops that were essentially HTML pages. The default had a background that changed depending on the time of day you turned your computer on. If they expanded the app to change based on different events that would be really cool. Maybe even change based on events in Twitter. You could have your background change when you got your 100th follower or something.