Target and twirl your tweets via Twitter add-ons

Twitter is a free communication and microblogging service (http://twitter.com). More and more people are using twitter to chat and share ideas, facts and nonsense (often of the smart kind). To say that one is finding a lot of insider infos and double entendres in the Twitterverse is an understatement. There is a universe of multiple entendres and a multiverse of hashed information out there.

Twitter is a link hub. A large number of the 140-characters-or-less-long tweets contain a URL connecting to a site with more specific content—or not. Anyway, if you have something to share and like to draw attention to your valued pages, including blog posts, you may want to twirl up title plus link as a tweet. Here are my favorite tools and third-party services that may help to spread your and other headlines and enhance micro-publishing.

Add-on tool	Web address	Description & Notes
Twitter button	twitter.com/goodies	From the Twitter Goodies menu, choose a button you would like to include in your websites. Blue and gray is the color of choice, but there are various formats with different degrees of animation. Here is an example showing a small one that happens to link to my TravelingAhead microblog: Be sure to be logged into your Twitter account, if you like a button with code that connects to your Twitter site. Alternately, you can select and download a Twitter icon from www.google.com/images, which you need to integrate into your page with your own code to customize a Twitter link.
TwitThis	www.twitthis.com	With TwitThis you can create a button to be displayed on a Web page. Such a TwithThis button enables a page visitor to forward the site's title (or part of it) and the site's URL (short-form encoded) to a Twitterer's site, such that it appears there as a tweet: Select Tools from the menu of the TwitThis page to browse options for button generation. You may want to integrate TwitThis buttons with your Blogger/Blogspot posts. See, for example, golatintos or trailingahead how this looks and works. Note that a button appears at the bottom of a displayed post only if the post was selected via click from the right-side table of content.
Twitterfeed	twitterfeed.com	An easy way to feed your blog to twitter (or facebook). All you need is to have your blog RSS enabled. Create your Twitterfeed account, or sign in if you already did. Then connect your Twitter account to Twitterfeed, paste your RSS feed URL into the appropriate form field and click to create feed.

To efficiently use the limited space of tweets, availability and reusability of tiny URLs becomes critical. The site Shortening and utilizing URLs demonstrates how to aprroach URL shortening.

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