Have you ever wished that there was a way to call out someone for posting a completely self-indulgent, arrogant, whiny, or self-important tweet? If so, you're going to enjoy Tweeting Too Hard.

Tweeting Too Hard is a Digg-like user submitted voting site, where the submissions consist of tweets that readers consider to be intended to make the tweet's author seem important. If that description isn't clear enough for you, have a quick browse of Tweeting Too Hard's All Time Top posts, and you'll get the idea very quickly. Things that will get your tweet submitted to Tweeting Too Hard include random mentions of how rich you are, mentioning a book you wrote, being curiously obsessed with your good looks and discussing them, among numerous others.

Users' votes for the worst-offending tweets with Back Pats. At the time of this writing, the top three Tweeting Too Hard submissions are:

1979 Back Pats: OMG i was saying how i couldn't afford the gas to fly daddy's jet to the riviera this summer, and this barista totally rolled her eyes at me

1761 Back Pats: fan belt light came on in the 911 so now I'm driving the Cayenne Turbo S - the backup, backup car. Trying not to think about the Tesla...

1651 Back Pats: it makes me sad, the more I have success the more people don't like me....

While it's certainly easy to game a system like this, the entertainment value is high no matter what.

Tweeting Too Hard has a commenting system, so you can discuss the unique charm of your favorite tweet with other users. Maybe surprisingly, the level of conversation seems fairly high at the moment, though if Tweeting Too Hard gains some serious traction and popularity, it can pretty much be expected that the comments will suffer from YouTube syndrome.

It seems like a site like this is purpose-built to catch celebrities showing their asses, and so far there's at least one in the top 5 -- can you guess who it is? How long before the All Time Top list reads like the cover of a tabloid?

How hip are you? Are you on the cutting edge of what's being talked about by those in the know? You know, the "twitterati"? (Sorry, I just gagged a little there.) If you enjoy stock market-based games, and tracking the trending topics on Twitter, you might want to have a look at Pretweeting.

Pretweeting is a virtual stock market where the commodities that you buy and sell are trending words on Twitter. As words become more popular, they gain value, and as they become less popular, they fall. Now, I should make this clear: this is a virtual game, no real money trades hands.

When you sign in to Pretweeting using your Twitter account, you are given $5,000 virtual dollars. You can then choose to research the current price for trending words, and buy shares in them.

Unfortunately, like other "viral" games, by allowing Pretweeting access to your Twitter account, you are allowing Pretweeting to post tweets on your behalf, a practice that I'm personally not a fan of. For example, when you buy shares in a trending word, Pretweeting automatically posts a tweet to your account like the following when I purchased 500 shares of the word "minute" using my test Twitter account:

@pretweeting buy 500 minutes -> see price at http://pretweeting.com/w/minutes

Yuck, right?

It's too bad that an otherwise fun game is handcuffing itself by being a less than stellar netizen. (Wow, first twitterati, then netizen. I feel dirty.) I would wholeheartedly recommend this game to friends if it weren't for the spammy messages every time you do something in the game. There's a prominent "Like this game? Tell your friends!" link that auto populates a tweet for you to tell your friends about the game. That one's fine; it's up to the user whether they want to do it. But auto-spamming messages based on activities is just plain user abuse, and won't do Pretweeting any favors in the long haul.

We first covered Twerp Scan back in April of last year. At the time we commended it as a useful way to scan your list of followers for accounts that are simply following you as a way to get onto your list and hopefully be noticed - in other words, Twitter spam followers. Since then, Twerp Scan has gone through a rather dramatic redesign, and has added the ability not only to scan the accounts that are following you, but also to scan the accounts you are following.

Twerp Scan then gives you a very nicely laid-out grid of those you are following or your followers depending on what you chose. You can sort on any of the column headers, including number of followers, number following, ratio of followers to following, number of tweets, and time of last tweet. For your followers, for example, very low ratios (anything under about 1:5) typically indicates a spam account - these are people that nobody wants to follow, but follow others very indiscriminately.

Even if you don't want to use Twerp Scan to eliminate spam followers because you want to hold onto all of the followers you've got to boost your follower numbers, it is also a useful tool for viewing and managing the Twitter accounts that you are following. You get all the same column headers, and the ability to sort the list any way you like, including sorting on multiple headings. You can also click on any row in the grid to get additional details about that Twitter account.

Twitter, when used correctly, is the ultimate meritocracy. You can freely follow anyone you want, and just as freely unfollow them. For most users this means following people whose tweets they perceive they are gaining value from, and not following people who waste their time. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, particularly when it comes to so many of the self-professed "Social Media Consultants" that seem to pollute my inbox when they meaninglessly follow me. But for the most part, the average Twitter user wants to get value out of what they read using the service, and provide value to their followers.

I'm puzzled then when services like Pay Me Tweets pop up, wanting you to trade your hard-earned credibility with your followers for a few measly (or should I call them weasly?) bucks. Basically, you're trading your followers' attention for money, something they will likely not appreciate. And what do users do on Twitter when they are not getting value any longer? They unfollow, of course!

While I think that users who choose to sell their credibility to Pay Me Tweets are making a big mistake, the people that choose to buy tweets through this service are making an even bigger one.

Businesses have certainly noticed that Twitter is a fantastic way to connect with their customers, but Twitter's personal nature makes it difficult for a team to share one Twitter account. CoTweet is looking to solve that problem, by allowing up to 6 different people to share one Twitter account in a graceful manner. Tweets from different people can have a "CoTag" appended to the end of the tweet, making it clear who actually posted a given update.

CoTweet is an alternative online Twitter interface, but to call it a power interface is probably understating matters. Along with handling multiple authors for a given Twitter account, CoTweet allows you to manage multiple Twitter accounts from a unified interface. So tweets from your personal account intermingle with your business account's tweets, but are clearly marked. You can easily monitor keywords and trends, have notifications of incoming tweets, assign tweets to others to follow up on, schedule tweets, track click-through on links you tweet, and maintain an archive of your sent tweets outside of Twitter.

While clearly CoTweet is aiming itself at business users, it's easy to see that it would be of value to any organization that is attempting to maintain an online presence.

A glance at CoTweet's homepage is enough to show that they are really on to something. The list of companies that are currently using their service is impressive. Twitter themselves are listed as using CoTweet, and my personal bet is that they will quickly realize the value CoTweet brings to the the Twitter platform, and acquire CoTweet.

CoTweet is currently free while in beta, and they have committed to give their user-base plenty of notice before beginning to charge for the service.

Twitter being the public communication platform that it is, where anybody is free to follow anybody else, leaves room for some interesting ways to use the information that people are passing around. For example, Twitcaps is a site that aggregates the links to photos that people post, and puts them together into a grid for easy browsing. You can view the pictures sorted by Newest Images or Most Popular.

Newest Images tends to be more interesting if you're looking to see a cross-section of what people are randomly posting links to, whereas Most Popular tends to be pictures of celebrities, since presumably these are more likely to be reposted by their fans.

When viewing the grid, you can mouse over any image to see the content of the tweet where it originated, and clicking on an image pops up a larger view. For the truly voyeuristic, there is an option to auto-refresh the page.

Of course, probably the most interesting function in Twitcaps is the ability to search for specific words, hashtags or users. The results may not always be what you're expecting, but it can be fun to see what comes up when you put a particular search term in.

Though I haven't come across any offensive material, keep in mind that the images displayed in Twitcap are random pictures being linked to by random people. Hey, it's the internet - browser beware.

Following people on Twitter that are at interesting conferences that I'm not at can often be frustrating, but sometimes it leads to a wonderful find. Recently Gina Trapani retweeted a somewhat cryptic tweet that made reference to javascript games, and offered deepleap.org as an example. Since the tweet in question also contained the phrase "getting mind blown", I couldn't resist heading over to deepleap.org to see what was there.

As it turns out, Deepleap turns out to be an incredibly fast-paced and addicting Scrabble-influenced word game. Knowing that it was created entirely using javascript makes it all the more amazing from a geeky perspective, but really, it's just a fun game to play.

The concept of Deepleap is simple; you are given letters on tiles at rapid regular intervals, and as your screen fills with them you must make words out of the letters you have available. Each word scores you points if it is a real word, but entering wrong words results in points being docked from your score.

The rapid-fire nature of the game is engrossing, but fortunately also makes playing in short bursts possible. This works perfectly if you're looking for a little coffee break pick-me-up that will get your brain juices flowing.

Twitter has made a change to the way users can track when they are mentioned by other Twitterers. The Replies page is no longer, and instead has been replaced by Mentions. To be more accurate, the Replies page has been changed into a Mentions page, though the URL twitter.com/replies remains the same.

What does this mean? In the sidebar of your Twitter page, rather than the word Replies, you'll see your @name, in my case @jasonclarke. That page now shows not only tweets where other people mention you at the beginning of the tweet (a regular reply), but also in any tweet that contains your @name. Fortunately, the setting that allows you to ignore @replies to Twitter users that you do not also follow still acts as you would expect.

It's an obvious move to give users the ability to see any time they are mentioned in a tweet, but it's a bit odd that Twitter chose to replace the Replies page rather than simply add a new Mentions one. It seems like it would be valuable to some users to be able to focus in on replies as opposed to any mention, particularly for heavy Twitter users.

Twuffer is a site that lets you keep a buffer of Twitter posts that will go up at times you schedule. Twitter plus buffer equals Twuffer, get it? In theory, this is a pretty good idea if you're someone who needs to make periodic announcements or post reminders at intervals. The thing is, I don't think the majority of Twitter users could do that without being annoying.

Twitter is starting to become more mainstream now, but the biggest complaint people have about companies and celebrities starting to use the service is that they come of as inhuman. Pre-writing your tweets only makes you seem more mechanical. Twuffer could be excellent if you use it on an account that only you follow, to post reminders to yourself. There are already services that do this, but Twuffer might be faster to set up.

I could be completely underestimating this service, though. The site suggests a few ways to use Twuffer, but if you have an idea about how it could be effective on someone's main account, let me know in the comments.

If you're still into Twitter (and apparently a lot of you are), TweetParty offers a yet another service based on the Twitter API that you might want to check out.

To get started, just sign in with your Twitter user name and password and you're shown the "my groups" page. Enter a name for your group, click the "create" button, and TweetParty will add it to the current page.

Clicking "manage" gets to the good part: a simple drag-and-drop interface to turn Twitter friends into group members. When you're done, click "update party" and you're done-- there's no limit to the number of groups you can set up.

Add TweetParty as a friend on Twitter, and you're set. Send a direct message to TweetParty with #yourgroupname in front, and they'll take care of the rest. It's a great service, especially on days Twitter is functioning properly.

If you have a decent social network but still haven't jumped onto the Twitter bandwagon yet, here's another reason to get on: when you find yourself arrested in a foreign country that may not offer you contact with the outside world, send a tweet out before you get taken down. Like James Karl Buck, who tweeted himself out of jail in Egypt.

After getting arrested for taking photos of a demonstration, Buck tweeted the word "ARRESTED." His friends, obviously knowing what that meant, talked to the right people, because the next day Buck walked out with an attorney paid for by U.C. Berkeley while having the U.S. embassy on the phone with him.

This story of a Twitter emergency use highlights two things: 1) using Twitter on a cellphone can be a great way to let a lot of people know fast that something is wrong, and 2) it's probably only as effective as the social network in your Twitter-sphere. Which is really just a guess, but an emergency tweet is unlikely to carry the same amount of weight with people that you don't know.

Although probably no one should rely on Twitter as an emergency service, it's nice to know that it's there in case we need to let everyone know we're in trouble. Thanks Twitter.

[via Techmeme]

Whether you use Twitter or not, you might want to check out Tweet Scan, a Twitter-based search engine. Basically, what Tweet Scan lets you do is search Twitter's public timeline for snippets of text. There are at least a few reasons this could come in handy even if you don't use Twitter:

1. You can find out what people are saying about a topic, web site, political candidate, etc right now
   
2. Twitter users may only be able to post 140 characters at a time, but they often post links to longer articles with more information, so you can treat Tweet Scan as a sort of blog/news search engine
3. Having trouble accessing a popular web page? Just type it into Tweet Scan and if a major web site or service is down, odds are other people are complaining too

If you are a Twitter user, Tweet Scan is also a quick and easy way to find other users with similar interests.

[via MakeUseOf]

Twitterbar brings Twitter to your Firefox toolbar. Released under the GPL, Twitterbar adds a tiny icon to the right hand side of the addressbar. Type your twitter into the addressbar, mouseover the icon to see how many characters you have left and click to post; It's just that simple.

Twitterbar also supports URL only tweets, simply click the icon without changing the addressbar text, the resulting tweet will automatically prepend "Currently Browsing: " to the URL.