When it comes to social media services, Twitter is now up there in popularity with Facebook, blogs, Digg and YouTube. A microblogging service that wants you to provide the answer to "What are you doing?" in 140 characters or less is used to post links to pages and Web content they like, to randomly update friends' on what's new, and also to market their own products and services via online tweets.
When you create your Twitter account, the site offers a basic update form box where you can send out your tweets. Outside of using Twitter's own Web interface, there are a number of applications clients, tools add-ons and helpers you can download to make tweeting a better, faster process. To help you sort out the best options for tweaking your Tweeter tactics, we take a look at several cool and useful Twitter tools including URL shrinks, Twitter clients and Twitter Web widgets to get you started.
Shrink That URL
One of the most important tools used by Twitterers are URL shrinkers — online services that will take a long URL you want to include in your Tweet and shrink it down. Technically speaking, these Web services provide short aliases for redirecting long URLs, however URL shrink is the more common description to use.
So, why would you need to redirect a URL? Remember that tweets are limited to 140 characters and you really don't want to waste that space with a long URL. That is why tweeple love URL shrinkers. You can toss out a URL and still have character space to describe what is on that Web page.
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