These days Twitter is everywhere and there seems to be a global conspiracy to promote it. In case you don’t know what Twitter is, welcome back to earth!

Twitter is a global community of people answering just one question - “What are you doing”? You can create an account and then start sending your current status using either mobile, instant messengers such as Google talk or direct from http://twitter.com/.

This process of sending “what you are doing right now” is called twittering! If you want to see what someone else is doing, you can add him as a friend and you will get updates on what he is doing right now!

Another interesting feature is the ability to embed your current twitter status on your Website or blog. For example, in my site on the right side bottom you can see my current status!

I usually update my twitter status from Google talk. But these days twitter bot is down most of the time. Using SMS on mobile is ruled out since it costs around Rs. 5 per message! So the only option left is to use the Website which obviously is cumbersome.

It is probably one of the most addictive, useless and time wasting concept man has invented! But I have put together a list of twitter tips, tricks and tools for all the Twitter maniacs out there

Twitter based Websites

Twitter badges - Twitter provides a set of Javascript and Flash badges using which you can display your or your friend’s current status.

Twitter timeline - Official Twitter where all the latest public updates are available.

Twitter commands - Official list of all Twitter commands you can use.

Twitter API - Want to build something based on Twitter? Try the Twitter API.

Twittervision - This is a combination of Google maps and Twitter. You can see live twittering which will popup on the map. Very addictive! They have added a digg type “like” and “dislike” buttons for each twitter that is shown.

Twitter search - Search Twitter for stuff. Looking for links? Try searching “tinyurl”.

Twitterholic - Catch the most popular Twitters based on followers, friends, updates or favorites!

Twitter Tools

Twitterrific - This is a Mac client for publishing and reading twitters.

Twitteroo - This is a Windows client. The main advantage is the automatic shortening of URLs.

Twapper - This is a mobile client for Twitter. Use it if you don’t want to be flooded with SMS messages.

Twitter Firefox Search Plugin -  Post updates to Twitter right from your Firefox search bar!

Tweetbar - This is a Twitter sidebar for Firefox and Flock.

Twitter tools - Twitter tools plugin for Wordpress if you are too lazy to create badges.

Twitter hacks

Binny has written a shell script for twittering. This is based on Twitter API.

RSS to Twitter - Here is a PHP script to feed RSS to Twitter!

Is there anything I missed? Let me know, I will add it here.

I have subscribed to feeds provided by Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon. These feeds let me know what is hot on the internet. When it comes to the number of breaking stories, Digg is much bigger than Reddit and Stumbleupon.

But there is one thing that irritates me about Digg’s feed. They don’t provide direct link to the news item being reported. Instead the RSS feed link goes to the Digg story. This means that every time I have to go through Digg to see the news item. It also means that when I share the news, people see the Digg news not the actual news item.

Reddit is smart. The main story links to Reddit, but they also provide a link in the RSS. Hence even though I can only share the Reddit link, I can directly click on the link provided inside the feed and checkout the story without additional clicks.

StumbleUpon is the best. Everything points to the original story reported.

I guess the reason for not linking directly in Digg is that they want maximum Adsense impressions. Also they seems to be looking for more pagerank via shared feed items. So looking from another perspective, they are the most clever among the lot

It would have been nice if Google Reader provided a mechanism to directly share a URL, instead of allowing only feeds to be shared.