About Tweet Links

I developed Tweet Links App for something that I needed personally for my Twitter account.

I use Twitter mostly for keeping up to date with the latest news and views in the area of software development and technology.

When I find information on Twitter that is useful to me, I retweet/post the URL/link of the website back onto Twitter. Knowing that I'd probably need access to again someday.

Once I needed access to that information again, I found it very difficult to find. Either using Twitter or my Twitter clients. This was where the original idea for Tweet Links came from.

I needed a quick and easy way to access the information I had already posted on Twitter.

Backing up your Tweets

I developed an iPhone application to log into my Twitter account and download all of the tweets that I had posted.

What I found when I looked at these tweets, was that a large percentage of them were actually useless..."Having a cup of tea", "just woke up, feeling tired" etc.

What stood out immediately, was that the tweets which were actually useful, were the ones that contained links to websites.

This small discovery got me thinking. If the links that I was posting were useful to me, what about everybody else using Twitter?

Filtering your Twitter Streams

I developed the App further by adding filters to remove tweets from my Twitter streams that did not contain links.

I was amazed by what I found. A good 30-40% of the tweets I was reading were useless to me!

By removing the mundane and pointless tweets..."Having a cup of tea", "just woke up, feeling tired" etc. my Twitter account suddenly became more useful.

Using Tweet Links App brought a whole new dimension to how I viewed my Twitter account.

Now that I had my Twitter account backed up, links became my focus. I made it much easier to access and share the links I found in my streams.

One of the great features of Twitter is Lists. Creating and subscribing to Twitter Lists allows you categorise and increase the accounts you follow.

I added Lists to the App, made them easy to access and filtered them for links.

Tweet Links App became a vast improvement on how I had been using Twitter so far.

Finding new information

Something was missing. I needed quick and easy ways to browse and search for the best new links on Twitter. Fortunately, Tweetmeme.com and Twitter Search came to the rescue.

Tweetmeme.com - Popular links

Tweetmeme.com do a great job of collecting the most popular links on Twitter.

If you don't know who Tweetmeme.com are, I'll bet you've probably seen one of their green "retweet" buttons on webpages around the Internet.

By allowing people to "retweet" the webpages they find important, Tweetmeme.com can show you which are the most popular webpages on Twitter.

Tweetmeme.com have an API which gives you access to their most recent and popular links, which is fully integrated into Tweet Links.

From a list of different News categories, I could use Tweet Links App to quickly browse and share the most recent and popular links on Twitter.

Twitter Search - Real-time links

A lot of people don't realise Twitter have a Search Engine for their tweets. This can be found at http://search.twitter.com

One of the features of Twitter Search is that you can search for tweets that only contain links.

I integrated Twitter Search into the App and added filters to remove duplicate links. This cuts out the noise and allows you to avoid looking at duplicate webpages.

I added an option to save searches and omit keywords that may lead to the wrong type of links being found.

Organising your links

Once I had a lot of links stored on my iPhone, I needed a quick and easy way to access them.

The easiest and most familiar way to organise links is to store them in Folders. However, it became very tedious going through each link individually, storing them in their relevant Folders.

Instead, I added Smart Folders that allow you to specify keywords in order to automatically group all of your tweets.

Smart Folders become exceptionally useful and powerful once you have a lot of links stored on your iPhone.

Tweet Links, a Twitter helper App

Tweet Links is a great App for backing up, saving, organising and finding your most important links on Twitter.

Filtered Twitter streams kill the noise, quickly focusing on information that is most important to you. One-touch web view and share makes it easy to get into the links and sharing them with others.

Tweetmeme.com integration allows you to quickly browse the most popular web pages being retweeted around the web. Filtered Twitter Search allows you to easily find links posted in real-time on Twitter.

Folders and Smart Folders help you organise and group your links so you can access them very quickly and easily.

Tweet Links App has been designed from the ground up and built for specifically for links.

I class Tweet Links as a 'Twitter Helper App' rather than a full blown Twitter Client.