Twitter's a great way to keep up with your friends latest thoughts and activities -- if you have just a few friends to follow or if you spend every waking moment monitoring Twitter. But if you follow a few hundred people and happen to walk away from your computer or mobile device for more than a few minutes, odds are you'll miss a ton of messages.

CrowdStatus makes it easier to make sure you don't miss tweets, by letting you organize your contacts into groups. Say you follow 100 people, but there are 10 people whose every word you want to read, another 10 who are usually good for a laugh, but aren't as critical, and 80 who you're just following to be polite since they already followed you. You can create three different groups and when you're in a hurry, just click the high priority group to display the latest messages from your top 10 list.

You can also share your group URLs with the world, letting everyone see the latest updates from Download Squad bloggers, for example.

Another tool we ran across which lets you visualize your Twitter messages in a new way is Gridgit. It's not quite as versatile as CrowdStatus, but Gridjit displays your latest messages according to user instead of in chronological order, making it easier to track the last few messages from each of your contacts. If you're willing to give up your password, you can also post to Twitter directly from Gridjit.

[via Blog Herald and WebWare]

In our increasingly visual culture, it's no surprise that someone has taken the time to visualize the data flow of Twitter and all of its tweets. It is a surprise, however, that seventeen different groups or individuals found a way to visualize Twitter tweets, each in a unique and supposedly helpful way (and our guess is that there's probably more out there).

The seventeen visualizations of the Twitter universe fall into four categories: network diagrams, maps, analytics, and abstract. Network diagrams center their visualizations around a particular topic or user. The maps visualizations are based, obviously, on location.

The analytics section is probably the most useful in the short- and long-run: you can find Tweet stats on individual words or phrases, measure the volume of tweets in a month or day, and measure real-time system-wide Twitter stats. The abstract section is, well, abstract. As in words can't quite describe, you have to see for yourself abstract.

The visualizations range from the decidedly useful (like TwitStat) to the simply confusing (Twitter Vrienden, see above image) to the just plain huh? category (e.g., twitter blocks).

Check them out, and tell us which one is your favorite in the comments.

Since its introduction, TinyURL more or less became the de-facto standard tool for shortening URLs to share across the web. You put a long URL in, you get a shortened version back, and everyone's happy - everyone, that is, except Chris Pirillo. As if already being a 'net celeb and go-to guy for all sorts of web culture and computer support, he's also consistently near the top of the Twitterholic list, often tweeting about one link or another.

Always one to voice a complaint when tools aren't quite getting the job done however, Chris tweeted a frustration with the way TinyURL works its magic, and Brett Taylor heard loud and clear. Thus, urlTea was born, a TinyURL-like service that brings some really unique features to the URL-shortening table. First, upon entering a URL at urlTea.com, it of course returns a shortened version but also immediately copies it to the clipboard (even on a Mac; nice). urlTea also offers a bookmarklet for instantly shortening any URL when you're far and away from urlTea's site, as well as an IM bot for the ultimate in keeping friendly tools close at hand. A very unique feature, however, is the ability to add any text to the end of a urlTea url with the inclusion of a question mark. This url for example: http://urltea.com/y3 can also be written as http://urltea.com/y3?coolest-site-evar, which offers a lot of flexibility if you want to add any relevant information for your lucky recipients.

As if this all wasn't enough innovation, the bottom of urlTea's about page lists quite a few features that are still to come. Not bad for a product borne out of a response to someone's twitterings!