Twitter Toys Galore

Even if you don’t know who Michael D. Jensen is, chances are if you use Twitter you know of one of his apps.

For the last months Jensen has become one of the premier Twitter App developers, creating applications that utilize the Twitter API in fresh and creative ways.

According to Jensen it began with a Tweet from Lee Odden:

@mdjensen some of these tools remind me of what you made for MyBlogLog. Any chance you’ll get into the Twitter tools game?

And from there he has had the Twitter application development fever.

TweetBeep – Launched May 6, 2008

TweetBeep is allows you to receive alerts when various key terms you enter are mentioned on Twitter. You can receive an email when someone is twittering about you, your company, your product, or your website. This is obviously a great reputation management tool, especially as Twitter grows in relevance among the everyday social media user.

Jensen stated that TweetBeep is his favorite Twitter creation:

“I think TweetBeep is huge, especially with the capability of seeing links despite the tinyurl/snurl/twurl. TweetScan is the only other “alert” service out there (last I checked) but they limit it to daily or weekly alerts, and no advanced features.”

LiveTwitting – Launched May 8, 2008

Jensen developed LiveTwitting.com due to a perceived need to organize and consolidate twitter coverage posts during live sessions at conferences and events. With LiveTwitting.com you can easily twitter in real-time, and then reuse the coverage in a blog post or other medium.

“LiveTwitting.com came as a result of reading a conversation on Twitter between @dannysullivan and @lisabarone, about live twittering conference sessions. Danny mentioned that there was a lack of tools for consolidating tweets after the fact. I twittered with Danny, he sent me some of his ideas/specs, and out came livetwitting.com. “

TweetAnswers – Launched May 12, 2008

TweetAnswers.com was created to help Twitter users find quick answers to their questions. The concept is similar to that of Yahoo Answers, of which Jensen is a fan, and sees great benefit.

HappyTwitDay – Launched May 31, 2008

HappyTwitDay records users wishing each other happy birthday on the platform, also offers the salutation and adds the information to HappyTwitDay.com. The app tracks how many people wished you happy birthday, and you can look up other Twitter users’ birthdays, or who shares the same birthday as you.

“HappyTwitDay is less useful than the other tools, but it is pretty fun”

Twanslate – Launched June 4, 2008

Twanslate is a Twitter Bot capable of translating tweets you direct message to @twanslate. This application has a ton of potential for Twitter users that travel, and need quick translation from their mobile device. Twanslate works with over 20 languages.

TweetBeep and TweetAnswers have a great deal of value to marketers. They allow you to not only monitor what is happening on Twitter in terms of your company or name, but also to utilize your followers for market research in real time.

As a fellow marketer it only stands to reason that Michael Jensen will continue to create great applications for our community. You can keep an eye on his developments by following him on Twitter @mdjensen