Even before Twitter purchased Summize and turned it into Twitter Search, users started to realize that a deleted tweet was never truly deleted. If you knew what it said, you could easily find it by searching for some of the words, and even if you didn't, you could see someone's deleted tweets in the results for "from:username." M.G. Siegler over at TechCrunch noticed that after Twitter made high-profile search deals with Google and Microsoft, they also decided to clean up the problem and stop indexing deleted tweets.

This is a big win for personal privacy, because although Twitter Search is relatively low-volume and you'd have to know where to look to find a deleted tweet, the sheer number of Google searches that happen every day would inevitably result in people seeing tweets they weren't meant to. I think it's great that Twitter has closed this privacy loophole, but it's also important to think before you post anything, because with retweets, third-party aggregators and the like, your tweets aren't always going to be isolated to your Twitter page. Treating them as public, Google-indexable info is probably the best policy.

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.

Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. It seems like it's everywhere, and people are trying to use it for everything. And I mean everything. For example, have you ever wished that you could remotely control your computer using Twitter? I have to admit that I have not, but I suppose I can see the convenience of using such a ubiquitous tool to send quick commands to a computer.

The services TweetMyMac and TweetMyPC allow you to do exactly that - send specific commands to your remote computer to have it perform specific tasks. Here's a sampling of the sorts of commands it can understand: shutdown, restart, logout, sleep, ip, screenshot, screensaver, open (apps), quit (apps), lock, etc.

While it would be extremely convenient to control a computer via tweets, personally I'm a little wary; the possibility of making mistakes would concern me, as would security concerns. You have to create a dedicated account that your machine uses to listen for commands, and it will accept commands from any Twitter accounts it is following.

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.

Are you leaving work early to fly off somewhere with your sweetie? You could Tweet that to your followers on Twitter, or you could tell them, "I'm going to ? out of work early today and hop a ? to Montego Bay with my true ♥."

Adding symbols to Tweets used to involve remembering a whole bunch of keystroke combinations but thanks to TwitterKeys, created by the folks at The Next Web Blog, all you have to do now is cut and paste.

Just drag the TwitterKeys bookmarklet to your toolbar and next time you're looking for a symbol, just click the link to open the directory. Find the symbol you like, copy it (Control + C), then paste it (Control + V) into your Tweet. Pretty sweet.

Two things to note: TweetDeck users will need to change the apps defult font setting to international/utf8 in order to use TweetKeys. Also, Mac users will recognize many of these symbols from the Special Characters set found on OS X. While not all of those characters will work cleanly in Twitter, the ones selected for TwitterKeys will.

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!