Twitter Power 3.0: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time

12Beyond Twitter.com: Third-Party Tools You Will Want to Know About

One of the things that really makes Twitter fun is that it comes with lots of optional add-ons. Twitter allows programmers to write applications that anyone can use and that extend the power of the service.

Some of them are a little odd. We've yet to find a good use for Twitter in Second Life. But some of them are extremely helpful. All sorts of applications let you send and follow tweets without opening your browser, for example.

That makes for hours of exciting experimentation—just the sort of thing that tech-minded people love to do.

On the other hand, if you want to skip straight to the most useful apps, here are some that we recommend.

SocialOomph

Follow someone on Twitter and there's a good chance that he or she will follow you in return. It's not guaranteed, but it does happen a lot. It's why one strategy to pick up followers is to do a lot of following.

The reason it happens a lot is that reciprocal following looks like good manners. If someone's following you, then it seems only right you should follow him or her back. As we've seen, that might not be the smartest move—it can make you look like a spammer, and you can't possibly follow everyone on a long list closely—but many people do it anyway.

And one reason they do it is that it's easy. SocialOomph (www.SocialOomph.com) lets you set up autofollows. Whenever someone follows you, you'll automatically follow him or her in return.

That can be a neat ...