Twitter is a social networking site that allows you to share short messages about what is going on in your life, or to share some cool link you have found.
Previously I have talked about Twitter scripting, Twitter GNOME integration and Tag Clouds.
Having a live and visual representation of what is happening on Twitter is quite fun. These are especially fun on a monitor or flat-screen, e.g. in a party, in an office, or at an event.
Twitter's own search is pretty good, it shows you the latest results for a keyword (or set of keywords) and automatically polls for updates, however you need to click to show you the updates, which reduces the usefulness on an unattended monitor.
A step up from this is Monitter, which allows you to put different keywords in columns and sort by geographic location.
Twitterfountain finds the latest messages for a keyword, and can also look on Flickr to find images to use for the background of the page.
Flotzam is able to pull from several social networking sites, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. However, Flotzam requires Silverlight on Windows or Moonlight on Linux.
Lastly, and my favourite so far, is Visible Tweets, this simply puts one message on screen and then animates to the next message.
Please let us all know if you find another one, or if you think of a cool use for one of these sites. Please also share any other sites or tools you are using.
<p>Last year everyone loved <a class="reference external" href="http://twitterfall.com/">http://twitterfall.com/</a> but I never see it mentioned recently.</p>
<p>twitterfall is still there, I just tried it, and to me it beats Visible Tweets hands down.</p>
<p>Problem with Visible Tweets:
* Extremely <strong>irritating</strong> animations! (There are three available, but no option for "none of these"
* It displays in reverse order, ie, a tweet 1 minute old, followed by another 2 minutes old, etc. I'm not sure whether <em>every</em> tweet in between is displayed.</p>
<p>I've never actually been much of a twitter fan, but I actually think the Twitterfall display could be useful.</p>
<p>Twitterfall - animation is pretty minimalist, it appears to display the tweets more or less in real-time as they come in.</p>