I recently discovered Cursebird.com which is a web site that tracks and views all twitter tweets in real time that have curse words in them.  It is too funny that there are over 100 swearing tweets a minute on average and it is hilarious seeing how many people are swearing and what they are swearing about.  For those of you who like sarcastic or crass humor, this is a site that will have you laughing with some of the tweets you will read.  You might even find some people worth following based on what they are swearing about.

Give this link a try, not for the squeamish though as some tweets can contain some pretty nasty language.

-Dragon Blogger

First See Dragon Blogger’s Christmas Wish List Video:

I have told readers on my personal blog that Mega Brand makes some great toys. I bought my kids a jumbo pack of MEGA Bloks almost 3 years ago and it gets daily use by my 5 year old and my 2 year old. Which brings me to Mega Brands toys and website in general, there is a wide range of products that encourage a child’s imagination and creativity. I am a big fan of their MagNext Sets which are parts which connect magnetically to form just about any type of structure you could create with standard blocks. Magnext Sets make things easy to build and even easier to tear down and clean up afterward.

Their catapillar play set is an amazing deal and hours of fun, they even have a 3 in one Ride On Caterpillar dump truck which is a ride on truck, a dump truck toy and a play center all in one. They sell stationary products for the artistic creativity in your children, complex building systems like Struxx, Disney Cars Play Sets, Arts and Crafts projects and so much more.

You can browse the site by category of toys, age range of the child, or my favorite which is by awards. You can see which toys have won awards in 2008, 2007, or 2006. Mega Brands sells something for every budget whether you have $5 to spend or $100 dollars to spend. I personally can vouch for many of their products, as I have purchased at least eight products over the last three years and almost all of it gets continual use by my family.

I feel when it comes to getting stuff for your children this Christmas, instead of getting all Action Figures and Fighting toys, mingle in some creativity toys and you will be surprised how often they get played with, they mix in quite well. My kids love to build Mega Blox robots and make them have battles and wars with their action figures, it is so great as when the MEGA Blox are destroyed they just build new ones to keep challenging the Heroes.

Trust me about this, if you don’t have any MEGA brand products your children are missing out, and I love getting in and building stuff with them just as much. You would be surprised at the level of detail you can get with a couple of hundred MEGA Blox, or a couple of dozen Magnext sticks.

-Dragon Blogger

TwitterCounter is an application that shows you your recent growth in followers as well as how popular a user is.  It can predict how much your growth will look like in a month based on how many followers you have been gaining in the past.  I am interested to see how accurate that will be.

It also allows you to create counters you can display on your blogs which I put on all 3 of my major blogs, much better to see I have over 300 twitter followers.  You can also see the Top 100 people on twitter based on the number of followers.

It is a nice website with a simple counter you can download, and I didn’t realize but according to Twittercounter I have been growing by about 8 followers per day. I find it awesome that people find me amusing enough to read what I say and talk about. That is the whole reason why I love blogging, is that there is an audience for almost everyone out there.

-Dragon Blogger

In experimenting and looking for ways to have fun and explore twitter, I stumbled across a web application called Twittervision. This application mixes the Google Maps API with the Twitter API to show tweets in real time across the globe and display their originating location on a map. This is a fun way to watch tweets from around the world. Since mostly when you see tweets on twitter, or tweetdeck you don’t know what location they are coming from without going into the profile of the user.

You can watch which topics are on the minds of people in Africa, or The Middle East, and keep track of which events are being talked about worldwide. Personally I was having fun just watching tweets pop up from all over the globe and just fascinated how worldwide twitter is and this really shows it.

Twittervision Default View (Click for Larger Picture)

If a 2D map is not your cup of tea, or for a real globe visual you can also click the 3D view and see an incredible globe of the earth in full 3D showing the daylight / nightime sides of the planet. The earth will rotate showing you each tweet and what location the tweet originated from.

Twittervision 3D View

I like the 3D view but since it rotates the globe for each and every tweet, it is easier to track and read tweets from the 2D view. It is still fun to watch and a great website to visit and check out if you have not looked at it before.

• Update: I found if you login to twitter vision on bottom left, you can click settings and configure twittervision to only show the tweets of your friends and followers:

-Dragon Blogger

I can’t believe it when I found out by browsing SocialSpark today that the website has a tie in to Twitter, if you click on the account menu and “Manage Blogger Account” you will be taken to the screen where you will click on Profile.

Then click on the connections tab on the right.

Then you can click the edit button next to twitter, or if you use pownce you can do the same with that service.

Once you click edit, then you fill in your twitter ID and password, and check mark which options you want to take advantage of.

(Click for larger view)

Socialspark will automatically send a tweet whenever you update a blog post, publish your blog on SocialSpark, Accept a Friend request, or get a payment.  This will help add to promotions for your account and your blog and is an excellent free resource and yet another great reason to use SocialSpark not only to make money but to increase your blogger social network as well.

-Dragon Blogger

Someone had tweeted a link to Twuffer on twitter so I checked it out and found lots of good uses and reasons for why somebody would want to post date tweets.

First Twuffer is a web based application that allows you to create tweets and assign a date/time you would like your tweet to go out. You can use it to post immediately, but that is not the main intention and benefit of the application. It also isn’t used for reading tweets strictly for creating, and tracking your post dated ones.

First thing you do is go to Twuffer

Login with your Twitter ID and Password, and then go to the Settings so you can setup your time zone. When you set a time zone, the tweet will post based on that hour in your time zone.

After you setup your time zone and date format, then you can start writing tweet’s and setting the date you wish for them to post. This is very easy, you just simple enter your 140 character message, and then use the “When to Tweet” drop downs to select your date and time you want to post the tweet.

I tested this early this morning, where I setup a tweet to post at 10am a few hours earlier, and it went off without a hitch.

So what can you utilize Twuffer for? Why Post Date your Tweets?

Here is the best reasons I can think of:

#1 if you are a blogger and you are going out of town, and you post date blog posts, you can post date tweets to tell your tweeple to visit your blog post, this will keep people checking your blog and advertising your blog while you are out of town.

#2 if you need to setup some reminders for you and a group of your twitter friends, this is a great way to setup tweetup reminders. Like if you set date a tweet for next week at 9am saying that you want to organize a tweetup. You can set a post dated tweet as a reminder for the tweetup in case you forget to manually remind.

#3 if you do a series or a specific time/date based topic of tweet, you can predate these. Like if you always mention something about sports at 11am on wednesdays, you can pre-queue these type of tweets.

Also, If I know I won’t have access to twitter for a day or 5 hours tomorrow, I can create a bunch of post dated tweets to keep up my “twitter” presence, without actually having to be on twitter.

Hope this helps.

-Dragon Blogger

Tweetbeep is a fantastic tool for getting alerts on specific keywords so that you can find out what people are saying.  But there are other great uses for setting up these alarms and alerts and I will give you examples below:

1)  If you want to know who is talking about you, setup an alert for your real name, your twitter name, and your blog URLS, like dragonblogger.com or justingermino…etc  This way you know if somebody has mentioned you and you can follow up later.

2)  If you are promoting something you can setup alerts for keywords related to what you are promoting.  Example:  Rock Along Productions is doing a show in Gilbert, Arizona at Crabby Dons.  Big Mouth Mason, Daughters of Fission, Opus Dai and Razer are playing there.  So I setup tweetbeep alerts for “Crabby Dons”, “Opus Dai”, “Daughters of Fission”, “Big Mouth Mason”, “Gilbert”, “Arizona Music”…etc this way if any of these tops are talked about, I can send a reply to the user and mention the upcoming rock show we are doing on November 22nd.  This is a great way to promote stuff on Twitter to people who have already expressed interest or mentioned something related to what you are promoting.

3)  If you have specific friends on twitter and you want to know anybody who mentions them, you can setup alerts for their names and blog sites as well.

The possibilities for alerts are endless, you can set each alert on different intervals, like only getting daily reports for 1 type of alert, but hourly reports for another type of alert.  This makes it easier for you to track the stuff you need to find out about quickly, yet only respond to the stuff less important at a lower frequency.

So everyone should be using TweetBeep.com to help track custom alerts, I hope this article gives you some idea’s on how to leverage it.

-Dragon Blogger

In my search to find new twitter applications and tools I found Twits Like Me a very simple to use website which will analyze your tweets and find people who have common and matching interests and topics.  You just go to the web site and enter your twitter username and click “Who is Like Me?”

You are then presented with a list of tweets and user’s who have mentioned similar tweets that match some of the tweets you have talked about.  This is a good way to find people who talk about similar items and like interests.  The tool could use some improvement however.

#1 - It shows you the tweets that are similar to yours but not the date/time of the tweet, so you don’t know when that tweet was said without clicking on the user.

#2 - The Twits Like Me system has no ability to know who you follow already, and therefore it will show tweets from people you are already following, and you may not realize unless you click on the name and see you are following.  If you are someone who tracks hundreds of people that you don’t remember everyone’s ID you could waste time checking out tweets from people you are already following.

Despite these area’s that could use improvement, like adding follower awareness, and showing you the date/time of your tweets, this tool is one option you could use to find tweeple who share your common topics.

Give it a try.

-Dragon Blogger

I am always looking for new Twitter tools online and specifically ones that can help me find people in my local communities.  I found a site called TwitterLocal.Net which allows you to find all Tweeple within a location you specify, and you get to set how many miles away from that location you want to include.

Here is a screenshot of the mainpage:

Once you specify a location and distance and search, you then have the option of viewing or directly adding all of the people to an RSS feed that you can stream into your blog, for instance if you wanted to mass list everyone with a location of Gilbert Arizona, this would come in handy for community gatherings and tweetups and such.

These tools make it easy for local people to find each other and organize events, meetups or Tweetups and just proves how versatile Twitter can be to help you socialize with not only people abroad but people in your home town as well.

-Dragon Blogger

MyTweeple is not a tool for writing and posting tweets, in fact the tool cannot do any posting at all to twitter.  However this tool is excellent at what it is designed to do and this is display your followers.

(Click Image to Enlarge)

My Tweeple has 3 choices, you can list everyone who is following you (but you aren’t following), everyone you are following but isn’t mutual, and everyone that falls in the previous 2 categories.

When you list Followers Only Not Mutual, you can easily select the “Follow” button and immediately follow them back to return the favor. If you are the type of person who follows everyone who follows you that is.

One thing I have notices, is you can have a follower, but if you try to follow them back and you notice it always shows them as a follower but you can’t follow back. Check their twitter account, I found several in suspended status and you can’t follow an account that has been put in suspended status.

But by far the best part about mytweeple is the ability to click “Export Following” link at the top of the page.  This will open a CSV file of all of your followers, or people you are following.

(Click to Enlarge Image)

So when you export your Follower list and expand the columns, you can see the following:
Twitter Account Name, E-Mail, Notes, Email and Web Page.
Only Twitter Account Name and Web Page seem to be very reliable, E-Mail just shows what comes before the @ sign, but you can’t see anything after the @ sign. Not sure why 2 email columns either. Notes seems to include location if the people have entered a location. Web Page will show the Twitter persons site if they had one listed on their twitter account.

But this export ability is a very good way if you want to build a list of your twitter followers and put it on your blog, or for some other purpose.

So give MyTweeple a try, it is worth it for the follower management in my opinion.

-Dragon Blogger