The last of the great Twitter apps

Hi, everybody! Tim Carmody here, guest-hosting for Jason this week.

There are fewer third-party Twitter applications in active development than there used to be, since Twitter built its own clients, clamped down on apps that “replicate Twitter’s core user experience,” limited the number of new user tokens third parties could get, and otherwise kinda spiked the well.

But there are still some gems out there, including some I was surprised I’d never heard of. Joanna Geary, Twitter’s head of news in the UK, recently put together a shortlist of 30 third-party webapps useful for journalists. Here are three I’ve been using and enjoying:

1. Followerwonk includes a number of useful searching and sorting tools, some free, some paid. I was especially impressed that it can give an inferred gender breakdown of your follows and followers that includes “undetermined” as a category. (A lot of other tools break everything down into male and female, which isn’t a good binary for human bodies, let alone the zoography of Twitter.) Being able to search Twitter bios is useful too.
2. TweetBe.at is a list manager. Twitter’s been neglecting lists — on the website “Lists” is even hidden behind an otherwise superfluous “More” button, inside your own profile — but they’re really useful. It’s just that even in the best third-party apps, it’s not easy to add or edit them. This fills that gap.
3. My favorite Twitter tool right now is BioIsChanged, which (you might guess) tracks bio and avatar changes for the folks you follow on Twitter. You can see when someone changed jobs, took a new headshot, or otherwise tweaked what they’re about online. What I like best is its customization: you can get new bio notifications in real-time (too much for me!), in daily or weekly digest emails (perfect!), or just whenever you check into the website. I’m getting better at pretending to be superhumanly attentive already.

Two other Twitter tools worth trying that aren’t part of Geary’s list but are worth a look:

I just started with Nuzzel, but it comes highly recommended by Christopher Mims and Lauren Goode, two reporters whose judgment I trust. Like Flipboard and Newsle and a handful of others, it pulls web links from your Twitter and Facebook feeds, sorting them by the most-shared. A good way to see what everybody’s talking about at a glance.

And Happy Friends is a mailbox/outline reader for Twitter that’s hard to explain but fun to use once you get into it. It’s not like anything else out there, which might be the best compliment I can give it.

Update: I missed an app that I’ve been using for so long and so often that I forgot to mention it. ThinkUp, which offers “analytics for humans.” The best thing about ThinkUp are its email “insights” digests, which tell me things like which users I’m talking to most often, whether I’m retweeting too many of my own replies (hint: when I asked you what you name your computers yesterday, I retweeted probably a few too many of your answers), and other little mini-analyses.

I also have to put in a plug for YoruFukurou, my favorite client for Mac. (I hope your tokens don’t run out, YF.) It’s a customizable, high-powered app that handles lists and spam reporting and link and image expansion well, but it doesn’t have that oh-my-god, Ozymandias-watching-30-TV-screens-at-once thing that TweetDeck has. An elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

• software
• Twitter