A lot of celebrities and musicians have embraced Twitter – in this round up post we take a look at 25 of the most popular for you to follow.

1. @johncmayer – Recording/Sandwich Artist

2. @iamdiddy – KING COMBS

3. @coldplay – The official Coldplay twitter page.

4. @ashleytisdale – The Official Ashley Tisdale Twitter Page. New album GUILTY PLEASURE coming 7/28!!!

5. @50cent – The Real 50 Cent

6. @souljaboytellem – Actor, Rapper, Producer, Gamer, & C.E.O. Of SODMG

7. @MCHammer – http://mchammer.com

8. @SaraBareilles

9. @MariahCarey

10. @petewentz – the official pete wentz twitter. bass, clothes, mischief

11. @AFineFrenzy – hi there, i’m ali. i’m in a band called a fine frenzy. life is funny. let’s have a laugh.

12. @markhoppus – he Official Mark Hoppus Twitter Page, for what it’s worth… Be warned, I tweet a LOT.

13. @twtfm – Share music on Twitter

14. @alyankovic – You know… the Eat It guy.

15. @johnlegend – The Real John Legend

16. @jimmyeatworld – A rock band from Arizona

17. @pitchforkmedia – The essential guide to independent music and beyond.

18. @amazonmp3 – Daily Deals and special sales on DRM-free, play-anywhere music downloads from Amazon. The official Amazon MP3 twitter feed.

19. @samantharonson – Don’t be mad, UPS is hiring.

20. @LennyKravitz – I am giving away two spots on my guest list for each show on my European tour. Starts 4/17 through the Summer. Let Love Rule!

21. @DaveJMatthews

22. @zoecello – Cello, computers and pancakes. The daily twitterings of a professional avant cellist and amateur nerd.

23. @PaulaAbdul – The Real Paula Abdul – American pop singer, dancer, choreographer, actress and television personality.

24. @noushskaugen – Download an Exclusive song FREE www.NoushSkaugen.com – Singer, Songwriter, Actress, Idealistic Dreamer….Together we can change the world…

25. @questlove – your favorite twitterer’s favorite music snob.

In this post we will be taking a look at yet more apps which extend Twitter’s functionality – These apps make it easy to upload files and share them with your followers.

1. File Social – “FileSocial is the easiest way to share files on Twitter. You can upload any kind of file, from pictures to videos,PDFs or Power point… Whatever you want”

2. FileTwt – “FileTwt brings file sharing to twitter. With FileTwt you can now easily upload and tweet about your files for free.”

3. Tweet Cube – “TweetCube allows you to share files on Twitter. Simple as that. Blast out your images, videos, music and more with just a couple of clicks, and your files are automatically posted on Twitter”

4. Twit Doc – “Upload your file, shorten the URL, and post a tweet all in one easy step. No sign up needed. Use your existing Twitter account in the form below or download our FREE Adobe AIR desktop client which enables you to drag and drop your files into your tweets”

5. Twitizer – “The free and easy to use service for sending long texts, photos (or other pictures), video clips and/or audio clips (or podcasts) to Twitter directly from your mobile/cell phone.”

6. Twitter Contd – “Upload up to 100MB of images, audio, video, and documents.”

7. Tweet FTP – “Upload a file to either your own FTP server (coming soon) or to uploads.tweetFTP.com and share on twitter via public broadcast tweets or private direct messages. This site is secured with SSL and uses OAUTH (signin with twitter). Currently, you are able to upload very large files (one file at a time)”

8. Tweetafile – “The only thing that people can do through email that they can’t do with Twitter is send files. Now with TweetaFile, you can. Pictures, videos, documents… whatever you want to share with your followers or individuals, you can do it with Tweetafile.”

9. Twit FS – Filesharing for Twitter, handles all types of file and you receive a set of links to publish to Twitter, Blogs, Facebook, Myspace, email, message boards, and IM

If you know of any other web apps in this category, please share them in the comments.

These days I’m find that I have quite a few Twitter accounts – my personal account, plus I register a new account for each new website I launch. It can be a pain managing all these Twitter accounts using their web interface so in this post Im going to take a look at apps which make this easier for you.

Web Apps

1. Matt – Multiple account twitter tweeting. Matt makes it easy to post to multiple Twitter accounts without having to log into each one every time.

2. Hoot Suite – “HootSuite is the ultimate Twitter toolbox. With HootSuite, you can manage multiple Twitter profiles, pre-schedule tweets, and measure your success.”

3. Twitt Bot – “TwittBot is a service that allows multiple people to publish to a single Twitter account, and for a single person to post to multiple Twitter accounts”

4. Tweet 3 – “An advanced, Web-based Twitter client that supports grouping, Facebook, stats, multiple accounts, pretty pictures, trending topics, and all sorts of other cool, awesome, and fantastic stuff”

5. SpliTweet -”Easy management for multiple Twitter accounts and brand monitor The definitive twitter client for heavy & corporate users. How many twitter accounts do you have?”

6. Twit IQ – “TwitIQ is an enhanced Twitter interface that provides insight into your Twitter stream and Twitter followers. With TwitIQ you get:

• Full Twitter View/Update features
• Keyword & Topic Insight into Tweets
• Filters for Tweet streams
• User Profiles with Keyword & Topic Insight
• Integrated Twitter and Blog/News Search
• Support for Multiple Twitter accounts
• + Many other UI enhancements”

7. Tweet Funnel – “TweetFunnel is designed for companies, organizations, academic institutions or anyone who would like to have more than one person contribute to a Twitter stream. You can also monitor for tweets mentioning your username, create stockpile of tweets for future use, schedule tweets and assign tweets to another user for follow up. Plus you can manage multiple Twitter account from one easy-to-use interface.”

8. Co Tweet – “Multiple Accounts and Multiple Users – Manage up to six Twitter accounts through a single CoTweet login.”

As always, if we’ve missed anything out – please tell us in the comments.

For those who’d like to delve a little deeper in to Twitter’s statistics, there are a number of handy apps you can use to analyize data. Some uses for these apps would be to track your brand name, see the data behind trending topics & to analyize your own followers. In this post I will be taking a look at some of the better applications.

1. Twitter Stats – Allows you to type a keyword in to the search and find out how many mentions of that on Twitter of a period of time. Displays a handy graph with your search result.

2. Tweetronics – A slightly more advanced version, this app shows the number of mentions of your keyword/brand and displays a chart, also shows the sentiment towards the keyword by showing negative and positive tweets.

3. Twitter Digest – “Large amounts of fresh tweets are streamed from Twitter API in real time and analyzed by Open Calais and OpenNLP in real time. These conversations are from millions of Twitter users. Topics and keywords are automatically identified and ranked by popularity within a 24-hour period. The topics ranked at the top gives a timely snapshot of what most people are talking about on Twitter today.”

4. Twittas – A number of different apps to find out statistics about your twitter account such as, when you will reach 1 million followers, how long you have been a member, finding your first followers etc.

5. Twitter Analyzer – Excellent app which lets you delve in to statistics about your account showing graphs of things like follower growth rate, commonly used hashtags, number of people exposed to your name etc.

6. Twitter Top Twenty – A number of Top 20 stats about twitter – top topics, users by followers etc.

7. Tweet Buzzer – Realtime statistics on brands being mentioned on twitter – can use it to search for your own brand as well.

8. Klout – “Klout allows you to track the impact of your opinions, links and recommendations across your social graph. We collect data about the content you create, how people interact with that content and the size and composition of your network. From there, we analyze the data to find indicators of influence and then provide you with innovative tools to interact with and interpret the data.”

The current Twitter homepage can be a little baffling for newcomers – especially those being driven there by main stream media who aren’t as techy as us web geeks. It took me over a year from first signing up to actually using the service on a regular  basis so anything that can help convert all this traffic to regular users will be a huge lift to the company.

One of the reasons Im really looking forward to this is because Doug Bowman, joined as their Creative Director, having left google no less for the position. A man who is very well known within the web design community and always produces high-end work – so lets see what direction he’s taking the new Twitter homepage in..

There are now a number of ways to share photographs and video with your Twitter followers – today we present you with the ultimate list of available apps so you can find the best fit for your twittering needs!

Photo Sharing Apps

1. Twitpic – The original and the one I personally use – its very simple to post a photo on twitter, Just login with your Twitter username and password, upload your photo and that’s it. Also allows you to post a photo via email and a number of iPhone twitter apps have twitpic functionality built in.

2. Tweetphoto – “Upload photos by email, mobile or web, See who viewed any photo, Favorite or retweet any photo, Photos are automatically geo-tagged,Filter photos by Twitter or Facebook friends, Automatically publish photos to Facebook, Search photos and see trending tags.”

3. Twitr Pix – “TwitrPix gives you, your friends, family and co-workers the ability to upload and post photos on Twitter using your mobile phone, desktop web browser or by email. Along with a photo of your choice, you can include a message that will get Tweeted with it.”

4. YFrog – A simple app from the people at Image Shack for sharing your photos on Twitter. No signup needed, just use your Twitter credentials.

5. Picktor – “Picktor is a social picture management service & community that enables users to manage their photos, share their photos, and interact with their online communities.”

6. Pikchur -”Pikchur is a simple service that updates your social networks / micro-blogging platforms with pictures – No need to signup, Just login with one of our many supported platforms and start sending your Piks today”

7. Twitgoo – “Twitgoo is a quick, easy, reliable, and safe way to share images for Twitter. Upload your pictures here or from hundreds of applications directly to Twitter.”

8. Screen Tweet – ScreenTweet shares videos, pictures, screen shots, and images on Twitter

9. Twit C – “Use Twitc to organize, search, view, comment, share, embed, batch download, collect, favorite, rate uploads, view timelines and profiles, post links to or embed files, and send updates to your profile on Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and 35 other sites.”

10. Virl - “Virl is small and contagious. Share Your Photos, Shorten URLs & Spread the News. Use Virl for Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious or Blogs & Websites Everywhere”

Video Sharing Apps

11. Twitcam – Allows you to film on your webcam, post the stream to Twitter and chat to your followers via your profile page. Twitcam then stores the videos on your profile.

12. TwitVid – You can upload videos from your computer to Twitter, from your mobile phone and also via Webcam.

13. Twiddeo – “Twiddeo is a powerful but simple service that let’s you do one thing very well: Twitter updates with Video. Upload from the web, your cameraphone and record from your webcam.”

14. Twit Lens – Allows posting of photos and video to Twitter, allows multiple uploading of files.

15. TweeTube – Share webcam videos, youtube videos, photos, pictures and urls via email and iPhone

16. Bubble Tweet – “A BubbleTweet is a short video (currently up to 30 secs) that plays in our floating Bubble video player over your “twitter” page and when it’s over, it pops and goes away. Designed to be both fun and simple to use, it let’s you to step out from behind your text-only twitter content and say ‘hello’ to your followers in very personal and engaging way.”

17. TwitVid – Video sharing for Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and Youtube – upload via the website or iPhone app

18. Moby Picture – “Directly share your photos, text, audio and videos with all your friends on your favorite social sites: facebook, twitter, flickr, vimeo, and more”

19. Tweet Reel – “Tweet Reel lets you shoot pictures and video on your iPhone, upload them to TweetReel.com, and share them on Twitter”

20. Greetter – “Greetter helps you to share Photos,Videos and Texts to Twitter. You can tag people in these photos and link to their twitter page. You can view and comment on other photos and Videos.”

21. 12 Seconds – “12seconds helps you update your friends and family with short video clips that you record with your webcam, mobile phone, or upload.”

22. Tiny Cast -”Tinycast allows you to record video and audio then share it on Twitter.”

Its always good to customize your twitter page to stand out from the crowd a little bit. If you dont have the time or skills to create your own background image then feel free to grab one of these brought to you by GoldenBlogging. We have provided the files in Photoshop .PSD format for you to download and customize.

We have used standard Windows system fonts – Arial and Arial narrow so you can edit in your name, details and relevent Urls.

You can insert your own photo in place of the cartoon character, or you want to create your own cartoon character you can use this great site – Face Your Manga, simply create a likeness of yourself and the site will email you the image which you can use on these backgrounds.

Once you have added the background image in Twitter, you will need to also enter the background color to match the image – we have provided you with the correct color code to use for each. The patterned backgrounds (wood, water and grass) do not require this.

1. Black – Download .PSD – Background color code : #2e2e2e

2. Marroon – Download .PSD – Background color code : #441818

3. Dark Green- Download .PSD – Background color code : #454117

4. Green- Download .PSD – Background color code : #174536

5. Dark Blue – Download .PSD – Background color code : #173545

6. Blue – Download .PSD – Background color code : #171e45

7. Purple – Download .PSD – Background color code : #331745

8. Wood – Download .PSD

9. Grass – Download .PSD

10. Water – Download .PSD

Credits

Cartoon Character – Face Your Manga

Polaroid Image – Sachyn at Stock.Xchng

Wood Texture – Ftlsis at Deviantart

Grass Texture – OneoddDude

Water Texture – Embolino at Share CG

We found out the other day that Twitter can help you be more productive, today we look at health and fitness apps to see if Twitter can improve your health (of course you actually have to work out, Twitter’s not that good. yet.) We also take a look at the top health & fitness twitterers for you to follow.

Web Apps

1. Twackit – You can use Twackit to keep a record of any metric you like, such as your weight, distance ran etc. Tweets and records are organised by way of hash tags.

2. Tweet a Run – Looks to be a great web app for runners, I cant wait to try it out (Im currently injured!). You login after a run, select a distance ran with sliding controls and save it – you run gets tweeted out with a hash tag and the app keeps a record of all your runs for you.

3. Tweet what you eat – Twitter comes in for stick sometimes about the amount of people tweeting about what they just ate, well now there is a whole app for it! Tweet what you eat acts as a food diary and logs the calories of what you enter for people on calorie controlled diets.

4. Food Feed – Another way to keep track of your eating habits, Users get their own profile page which records the food you have eaten.

5. Ugomo – An advanced app for letting you log different types of workouts. You can log, type of sport, duration, heart rate, time, date and view numerous graphs and statistics from your account.

6. Tweetplot – A simple service for logging metrics from which you can then generate a graph.

7. GtFtr – An app to log various forms of exercise

8. I did my bestest – “Tweet your distance, time, and notes and we’ll chart your data, compare to other users, etc.”

9. W8Track – Keep a record of weight (loss) via this simple web app

10. Twitfitter – A Ning based, fitness community for twitter users. “TwitFitter is the place for fitness enthusiasts and fitness professionals to motivate each other to work out, stay healthy, and get fitter.”

Top Health & Fitness Twitter users

1. @Goodhealth – Health.com magazine’s twitter feed

2. @Highwindfitness – Promoting, encouraging, and educating fitness, health, and nutrition

3. @FastMuscleGain – Muscle gain ,weight loss and fitness expert

4. @Health_Coach – My passion is natural healing using the latest in nutritional and dietary interventions

5. @JillianMichaels – Jillian Michaels Online – Visit the website of TVs Toughest Trainer. You don’t need to be a contestant on The Biggest Loser to reach your potential!

6. @FitnessMagazine – FITNESS Magazine: Changing the conversation from ’skinny’ to ‘healthy’ and helping you embrace fitness as a lifestyle

7. @lisajohnson – Fitness Industry since ‘97, Owner of Modern Pilates since ‘99. Fitness blogger, Greenie, Mom, Photographer, Golfer, Wanna-Be Fashionista, Happy Almost Always

8. @JoeGigantino – itness, Motivation, Wellness, Inspiration, Workout, Health Clubs, Communicator, Visionary, Entrepreneur, Family, Health, Nutrition, Love, Passion, Purpose

9. @runnersworld – Twitter account for Runnersworld.com magazine.

10. @WomensHealthMag – Women’s Health is your ultimate guide to looking and feeling great. We’ll bring you the latest in health, fitness, sex, beauty and more

11. @MensHealthMag – Men’s Guide to Fitness, Health, Weight Loss, Nutrition, Sex, Style, and Guy Wisdom

12. @FitBusyPeople – Ultra-busy father of two, busy exec, fat loss coach and certified trainer helping people change their lives w/fast & effective workouts and fitness advice

13. @JamesWorkout – I am a 43 year old hardgainer . Exercising like a madman. I Tweet all my workouts ,its a bit much but it does motivate me .NEVER TO LATE!

14. @BodyForWife – Fitness author of Body for Wife: The Family Guy’s Guide to Getting in Shape. Sarcastic, witty, and politically incorrect health, diet and exercise advice

15. @losethefatnow – am an Indepentant BeachBody Coach currently going thru P90X. Check out my site I have a free one on one video coaching program

16. @LegitMuscle – My blog Legit Muscle teaches you how to use diet, supplements and training to maximize muscle gains and get in the shape you want.

17. @skwigg – Fitness blogger. Dog mom. Work in TV. Love scifi, MMA, kettlebells, TRX, Pilates, BlackBerry, Mac. Also, I run in flip-flops and spill things.

18. @tomvenuto – Author. Passionate about bodybuilding, fitness, personal development, writing, reading, science, psychology and helping you get healthy and LEAN the natural way

19. @Fitcoach2007 – Creator of YourWeightLossMentor.com, Husband, Father, Christian, Fitness Wellness Anti-Aging Coach, Healthy Cooking, Firefighter Paramedic, Internet Marketer

20. @lomak1985 – Fitness is very important to me, and I like to help others get in shape for free

That concludes our roundup – as always if you know of more health & fitness apps or websites we have missed please leave links in the comments.

Twitter is great for connecting with your friends but if you wanted to find people more local to you ? Maybe you are a business wanting to connect with potential customers or you’d just enjoy twittering with people in your vicinity, Luckily there are a number of apps available that address this situation. In this post I will be taking a look at some of the options available.

Web Applications

1. Geofollow – Geofollow is a twitter directory you can add yourself to based on location and find other people nearby. Allows you to search by location, tag or drill down on a Google map.

2. Local Tweeps – Local tweeps allows you to :  Get found by tweeps near you, Find tweeps near you based on location or keyword & Post and browse local events and specials.

3. Street mavens – “StreetMavens is your interactive guide to what’s happening around town. Watch for trends, find new customers see what’s going on at your favorite resturants or clubs… all in real-time.”

4. Chirp City – “ChirpCity: Local Twitter search, latest tweets from and about your city… and a top user list for the cities above.”

5. Twitter Score – Shows the top twitter users by location

6. Its on in – Search for events happening on your city. If you’re runing an event or know of one happenining you can add it to the site and use hashtags to help people find it. Nice use of a short url for twitter.

7. Happn.in – Shows what people are twittering about in your city.

8. Twibez – “Twibez can be useful for everyone who is interested to see where in the world twitter users are discussing top trends in real-time. You may find out people in New York are twittering about certain top issues much more than people in California. Or you just want to know where in the world, people are discussing a certain topic right now.”

9. Twellowhood – Part of Twellow, the Twitter yellow pages, Twellowhood shows a world map that you can click through to your location and find users in that area.

10. Tweetup meetup Groups – If you’d like to attend or organise a Tweetup, you can find them listed by city here.

11. Nearby Tweets – “Nearby Tweets project was developed by Brian Cray to extend Twitter’s capabilities into its true potential: a geography–centric social tool for networking and a business tool for building customer relationships and monitoring real–time buzz.”

12. Twitterholic – Another site for ranking twitter users followers, updates – allows you to view users by location also.

iPhone Applications

13. Tweetie – My personal favourite iPhone app for Twitter, uses the iPhone GPS and locates users nearby your position.

14. Twinkle – “Discover, connect, and send messages to people nearby. Upload photos and update your Twitter account. Contact old friends and make new ones, all with Twinkle, the location-aware network for the iPhone and iPod Touch.”

15. TwitterFon – Available as a free and paid version, this client allows you to search for users based on proximity to your iPhone.

16. Twitterlator – The most full featured iPhone Twitter app I know of, this includes lots of location based features such as adding a map of your current location to tweets, getting a map of a users location, search for users nearby etc.

Other Applications

17. Twitter Local – A desktop Adobe AIR application that lets you filter tweets by location.

There has been lots of talk and speculation about just how Twitter will monetise their service, they have kept very quiet about their plans so far but it cant be very far away now. We have even seen leaked documents of their financial forecasts predicting $millions in revenue, so just how do they expect to achieve it? In this post I will throw out a few ideas.

1. Premium Accounts

There are a number of things twitter could offer to users who pay a monthly fee for a premium account and I know, I for one, would definately pay up for them :

1. Allow you to add more users per day than the current limit of 500 – maybe up this to 2000 or so and it would allow you to grow your followers 4 times as fast.
2. Verified account, if you’re a brand or celebrity you could pay to have the verified tick next to your account.
3. Analytics, they could offer some indepth analytics about your account – amount of new followers per day, click throughs on your links, retweet rates etc.
4. Access to improved customer support, the support at the moment is a bit erratic – premium subscribers could get access to a priority support representative.
5. No advertising, see below.

2. Sponsored Tweets

How about charging you to send out a sponsored tweet to x amount of people based on their interests. The receivers would not have to be a follower of yours – the tweet would appear in their timeline anyway.

So for every, 50 normal tweets you receive, you also receive a sponsors tweet. If you wanted to opt out of these – you could upgrade to a premium account, see above. I would be very interested in this, imagine being able to send a tweet offering a web design service to 1000 people who had expressed an interest in finding one?  Or sending a voucher code for your ecommerce store to people who had been tweeting about your products ? I think this could be a killer idea.

3. Pay Per Click advertising

We have allready seen evidence of this around twitter with the addition of links to various twitter apps and websites in the sidebar. Its possible they have been testing this for free to find out click through rates, tweaking the ad serving software.

With 20 million+ unique visitors per month to the domain twitter.com, that’s a huge audience which can be utilised. If they implemented a Google Adwords style system where people can bid on keywords to appear on people’s profiles and in search results I think it would be a great success. They could even partner with Google and use their existing system to implement the ads.

4. Charging developers

A lot of web apps and websites are making a lot of money from Twitter when the main site is not yet! An income stream could be charging developers for usage of their API – a tiered system could be put in place where its free to use but once your app is popular and making x amount of calls then y0u could be charged. Im not advocating this method as one of the reasons for Twitter’s success is all the add-on apps so it would be a bit of a kick in the face to the developers. A better way may be to keep the API free but offer premium developer accounts with access to more resources, future developments, priority help etc.