Twitter recently announced that 1.5 million apps have been built with its API. Although the web app is best for keeping track of world news in realtime, the third-party apps built on its API his given Twitter a little more flare.
I tracked down 13 killer Twitter apps that will help boost productivity, increase smiles, and even help to quiet down those loudmouths who have to tweet every single word at conferences.
1. Share a pint: Tweet-a-Beer comes to us from the land of tasty microbrews, Portland, Oregon. The app connects your Twitter and PayPal accounts using Chirpify – an ecommerce platform that lets you buy, sell, and donate money – so you can safely send money to a Twitter pal in $5 allotments.
2. Find out when friends are snoozing: Sleeping Time lets you search for a Twitter user to see when they are most likely to be sleeping. The app analyzes the average length of quiet time between tweets to guesstimate when your friends are more likely to be getting some shut eye.
3. Check your progress from a year ago: Connect your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Foursquare accounts to TimeHop to get a morning email of everything you posted the year before. Timehop accesses all of your posts and packages them in a cute email. It’s great for gauging how close you are to reaching the goals that you set for yourself the year before. You might even feel like you are reading the posts of a stranger!
4. Discover your geographical impact: Vizify highlights things like your top followers, most viral content, and even your geographic impact. The app collects data about your Twitter account and serves up a beautiful infographic with your personal analytics – including a map of states where your tweets are most influential.
5. Play Tetris: Want to repurpose 140 characters of public tweets for your own pleasure? Try playing a game of Twetris. Tweets of varying lengths fall from the top of your screen like Tetris blocks. You must use your keyboard to stack the falling tweets before you run out of space.
6. Make a decision: If you want to ask your followers an either/or question, check out YelpGuru. Simply tweet out a question with two options and watch the answers stack up. YelpGuru autotweets your questions, collects answers, and provides you with a helpful bar graph.
7. Mute noisy users: Never suffer through the tweets of a conference goer again with Proxlet. By filtering tags and keywords, Proxlet is able to mute users for a specific amount of time without unfollowing someone.
8. Create coupons: Marketers can now use Twitter to create coupons for online and offline purchases with Twtqpon. You can save time and a tree by keeping track of coupons through Twtqpon’s creations and redemption too.
9. Buy virtual goods: Need more gold but too lazy to farm it yourself? Just buy it through Twitter with Twitpay. The app enables you to buy and sell virtual goods by tweeting your transaction.
10. View your status in images: Portwiture answers the question “if your tweets were interpreted into pictures, what would they look like?” The app collects data from your status updates and matches it with tags from Flickr photos.
11. View recent tweets in your neighborhood: Want to be the nosy neighbor without putting your pants on and going outside? Check out Nearby Tweets, which aggregates location tagged tweets in your area.
12. Publicly shame yourself into being healthier: There are a number of health sensors on the market that are built to shame you into losing weight by autotweeting your health markers, including sleep: Zeo, weight: Withings, and steps: Fitbit. Once you’ve bought the sensor, you can authorize Twitter to connect with the device.
13. Follow political candidates: American politics is a three ring circus. Thankfully 2012twit contains the festivities in one easy to follow visual feed. The Twitter dashboard for the 2012 presidential election aggregates tweets based on tags, keywords, and candidates.
There’s more to Twitter than just tweeting. Have fun out there in the Twitterverse. If you don’t like these 13 suggestions, there are at least 1,499,987 more options for you to check out.
