Twitter is a cultural phenomenon these days. In the few short years of it’s existence, it has gone from becoming just the latest social kid on the block, to the service which most of us see/read even before our daily newspaper.

Different people use twitter for different purposes. Some use it to share interesting links with their friends, some use it to share funny jokes and some use it as their own public instant messenger, broadcasting intimate details of their life. All this was before some enterprising open source enthusiasts decided to come together and use Twitter for something even bigger – remotely controlling their PC.

TweetMyPC is an open source application that lets you send commands to your PC via Twitter and instruct it to shutdown, logoff, restart, download files off the internet and a lot more.

If you are unfamiliar with Hootsuite, it is a very feature-rich web based Twitter client. Their tag line is “The Professional Twitter Client”. This is very true. It has a great number of configurations and options which make managing one or multiple Twitter accounts very easy. Many of its features are pretty appealing to big businesses who use it, of which, there are some pretty big names listed on the Hootsuite homepage.

I personally do not use the desktop application, so I am going to talk about the web version.

Video blogging is increasingly becoming a popular form of reaching out to your audience. Wouldn’t it be great if you can combine this with the popular social media tool – Twitter?

There are three services that are doing just that. They are helping Tweeples with video/web cameras broadcast to their followers. More and more, bloggers, podcasters, music artists, celebrities, etc. are using them to engage with their audience in a colorful way. Here are the three video tweet services that will help get you on your way:

The folks at Seesmic have been busy little beavers recently. Not only did they put out an upgraded for the desktop application I reviewed, they debuted Seesmic for the web. The release is being calling it a preview, which I’m guessing is a lot like a beta. The web application offers a lot of the same functionality available in the in the desktop app, but gives you the ability to access it from any web browser.

In the battle of the social media sites, the two that seem to be everywhere these days are Facebook and Twitter. The hardest part of immersing yourself in any type of social media, be it for fun or for business, is managing it well. With all of the web based options available, most are geared towards managing a single site or account; it’s great to see Seesmic stepping up and making a very user friendly solution to manage multiple accounts for Facebook and/or Twitter.

The Seesmic desktop app is a free cross platform Adobe Air based application. This very usable Adobe Air based desktop application was designed by the same folks that made Twhirl. If you have used the Twhirl app before, you should definitely give the Seesmic app a try. It is a happy medium between having too many features which can make it hard to use, and too little features which would make it not very helpful.

If you have only one Twitter account, there are thousands and one tools that you can use to post your tweets and receive updates. However, if you own more than one Twitter accounts, you will find that managing them simultaneously is not as easy. Most Twitter clients (including the Twitter website) support only one instance of Twitter login. To post to multiple accounts, you will have to log out and log in again with the new username, which can be a troublesome chores, time consuming and ineffective task.

If you are facing difficulty juggling different accounts, here are 8 useful tools that you can use to manage your Twitter accounts simultaneously.

You would be hard-pressed to go anywhere or even watch television without hearing some reference to “Twitter”, “tweets”, or “tweeting”.  From your cousin in Iowa to Shaquille O’Neal, all types of people from all walks of life have taking a liking to Twitter.

Whether or not Twitter will become a technological standard as email or just a passing fad, remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that if you want to use Twitter while it is hot, you will probably want some type of client so that you do not always have to open your web browser and go to Twitter.com.

For KDE there are a few options, but there is one that I have found to be superior to them all.  Keep reading, or if Twitter has convinced you that you can only process 140 characters of information at one time, scroll to the end of this article.

While I have covered 16 interesting things that you can do with Twitter, it only covered the tip of the iceberg. Ever since Twitter released their API, there are really thousands of things that you can do with it – one of them is to track your FedEx, UPS, USPS and DHL shipment with Twitter.

TrackThis is a Webservice that monitors your package shipment for you. To get started, simply follow TrackThis at http://twitter.com/trackthis and wait for it to follow you back. Once that is done, you can send your shipment tracking code via a direct message to TrackThis.

The syntax to use is [tracking code] [nickname of package]. For example, if you ordered a PC and the tracking code from FedEx is 1234567, send:

d trackthis 1234567 PC

Trackthis will then reply you with a direct message each time your package changes location.

If you know of any other interesting applications with Twitter, do let just know.

[via CyberNet]

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Using clients like twhirl or twitterfox, you can post tweets to twitter from your desktop and Firefox browser. However, if you spend a lot of time on Open Office, you may want a quicker way to get your twitter updated, without having to leave Open Office.

OOoTwitter is a simple Open Office extension that allows you to post to Twitter. Once installed, it will load an input field where you can submit your message to Twitter. It is very easy to use and it is unobstructive and can be loaded from the menu Tools -> Add-ons -> Post to twitter.

I have just started using Twitter and I am already addicted to it. If you are also having fun with it, here are some applications that can make your twitting more interesting and meaningful.