Tools, tools, tools - II

It only took a month after the first tools post, but below are 6 more useful tools:

1. BackTweet - for finding URLs used in tweets - particularly handy because of the URL shorteners (like Bit.ly) that are so heavily used, meaning a normal search in Twitter search won’t pick up a URL string.
2. Bitly - good for shortening your own links into any tweets of your own, but if you ever wanted to see the usage stats behind anyone else’s bit.ly link you can also easily do this: just add “info/” in the URL - eg http://bit.ly/AqQxD becomes http://bit.ly/info/AqQxD. This lets you see number of clicks, location, and importantly the different tweets the link was used in - which can help show propogation and passing around of a tweet/link.
3. BackType - for comments on blogs etc - useful because a lot of the free blog search sites tend to focus mostly, or exclusively, on main blog posts and not any comments made on the posts.
4. Feedburner - for those that know Feedburner, its core use is for simple RSS feed management and measurement. But it can also come in very handy for turning RSS feeds into email subs for those clients, or colleagues, who don’t use RSS readers. Plug the RSS feed of a Twitter search result into Feedburner for example, and send your client the email subscription link from Feedburner.
5. Touchgraph - A great tool for both finding and visualising relationships. There’s versions for Amazon titles, Facebook connections, and Google searches.
6. Chartbeat - One of many emerging offerings revolving around real time site analytics. Literally real-time. View an example here.

The next tools post will probably be all about the best iPhone apps I’ve found.