Twitter in plain English and Twitter app recommendations: Twitbin, Flock and Utterz

by Ben Martin CAE on March 7, 2008 · 0 comments

Maddie blogged about some Twitter stuff. I have some stuff to add.

First and foremost, there’s a brand new Commoncraft In Plain English video about Twitter. If you still don’t get Twitter, watch the video and behold its awesome power.

Here come my favorite Twitter apps:

Twitbin is a Firefox plugin that lets you see updates and post to Twitter from within your browser. It’s a little unstable, but works pretty well.

Flock is a web browser built on mozilla with all kinds of social networking goodness baked in. Read from and post to Twitter, get facebook updates, YouTube updates, Flickr updates, all right within Flock. It’s also a bit unstable, but very, very cool. I read about it months ago, but only after seeing it nominated for a SXSW web award did I download and install.

Utterz is the coolest website you’ve never heard of. I honestly thought it could win a SXSW web award this year, but it’s not even nominated. It’s tres cool nonetheless, and it works with Twitter (among other social medias like blogs and facebook). Once you’ve set up an account, here’s how it works:

  1. Shoot a photo or video with your cell phone.
  2. E-mail it from your cell phone to Utterz.
  3. Within 10 minutes call Utterz from your cell phone and record a narration/description of your video or photo.
  4. Utterz stitches your photo (or video) and your narration together into a single web page (here’s an example).
  5. You can configure Utterz to automatically tweet a link to your Utterz post.

You can also configure Twitter to work with all kinds of other web apps. IwantSandy.com is a virtual personal assistant that takes instructions from your tweets. You can get news and the weather and traffic reports through Twitter. All in 140 characters or less: Perfect for the attention starved world we live in.

I think Twitter is the easiest social network to join, because you don’t even need a computer to get started. To start tweeting and following my tweets, just text “follow bkmcae” to 40404, wait a few seconds, reply to the Twitter-generated text message you receive with your name or preferred internet alias, and you’re done. You now have a Twitter account and you even have a Twitter page at http://twitter.com/youralias.

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