Since I jumped on the Twitter track about a year ago, I’ve discovered a growing number of tools for searching, finding followers, shortening links, monitoring, measuring and analyzing traffic. The list of active twitter tools and apps is growing daily and and has reached almost 3,000. It’s a chore keeping up with the best and most useful of them, so here’s what I’ve compiled so far.

So Many Friends and Followers…

Twellow – A Twitter directory.
Localtweeps – Find Tweeps near you.
TweetWheel – Finds out which of your Twitter friends know each other.
Tweetizen – Lets you categorize your followers and then follow only that feed.
FriendOrFollow.com – Find Twitterers you follow that don’t follow you back. I use this one.
Twitter Friends – Compare your tweeting behavior with others.
TwitterSheep – Creates a tag cloud of all the words in the bios of a given Twitter user’s followers.
Qwitter – Notifies you when someone unfollows you.

Hashing out Hashtags…

Hashtags.org – Hashtags tracks the most popular Twitter posts that include a #hashtag. You can subscribe to an individual hashtag using RSS.
Twubs – Find hashtags.
What The Trend? – Find hashtags that are rising in popularity.
Tagalus – A hashtag dictionary.
twopopular – Tracks hashtags and keywords in real time or by time intervals.

Find stuff on Twitter…

Tweetscan – Schedule Twitter searches to be sent to your email
TweetGrid – Creates a Twitter search dashboard that updates in real time.
TwitterLocal – A desktop app that finds Twitter users within a fixed radius of a city or zip code.

Tracking Whats Hot on Twitter

MicroBlogBuzz – Tracks the most popular links shared on microblogging services, including Twitter, Jaiku and Identica.
Twit(url)y – Tracks popular links and displays them in Digg-like fashion.
ReTweetist – Tracks the most popular retweets.
Twemes – Tracks Twitter memes.
monitter – monittor is a real-time keyword-based monitoring service that lets you watch three columns of keyword streams side-by-side. You can subscribe to them using RSS
Twitter Charts – Twitter Charts gives you a visualization of when a particular Twitter user is most active. This is an excellent tool to determine the most opportune time to engage a given person.
twopopular – Tracks hashtags and keywords in real time or by time intervals.

Stunned by Stats…

twInfluence – Ranks Twitter users’ influence.
TwitterGrader – Grades a given Twitter user according to influence. Includes power users by geographic location; suggests who to follow and allows you to check if someone is following you.
TwitterCounter – Provides stats on a given Twitter user and lets you compare that user to two others.
TweetStats – Gives you Twitter statistics about a given user.
TwitterMeter – Twitter Meter allows you to enter a word to graph it’s use on Twitter’s public feed.
Twitter Analyzer – The best Twitter analytics tool I have found to date. Offers a ton of statistics.
Twitterfall – Real-time monitoring.
Tweetzi – Advanced Twitter search engine.
Tweet Volume – See how often words and phrases are mentioned on Twitter.
TweetEffect – Find out which tweets gained and which tweets lost you followers.
Tweetmeme – Tweetmeme tracks the most popular links on twitter every 5 minutes, categorized by types of content: Blogs, images, video or audio.
Twistory – Pumps your Twitter feed into a calendar application so you can visualize your Tweeting history.

Your URL tools

Twitclicks – Shortens URLs and tracks clicks.
Bit.ly – Shortens URLs, counts clicks, shows who else shortened a URL and provides metadata about that URL from across the Web.
Twitlinks – Tracks most popular tech links from most popular tech Twitterers.
Twitturls – Tracks popular links.
Tweetburner – Shortens URLs and tracks clicks on Twitter and FriendFeed.

Keeping it all together with desktop managers…

Twittervision – Real-time geographic posts to Twitter.
TweetChannel – Create Twitter channels.
Tinker – Aggregates Twitter conversations around topics.
Splitweet – Multi account manager and brand monitor.
CoTweet – Lets multiple people manage a single Twitter account in a rational manner.
TweetDeck – An Adobe Air desktop application for Twitter. I love TweetDeck!

Twitter developers are constantly developing new tools, so look for updates to the Social Media Minute categorized tool list in the future.