Twitter Tools is pretty cool

If you have a wordpress blog and the thought of bidirectional integration with twitter is interesting, twittertools is pretty cool. For a long time, used KBB RSS widgets to display the RSS feed of my facebook status on my personal, unedited, why would anyone else possibly care web site (aka “blog”) and never really noticed how slow it was to retrieve the RSS feed (and maybe the facebook fave icon) but it seriously hung the page load times. Plus FaceBook is so last month. I mean seriously, who uses it any more?

Twitter is only so last week and while it may already be uncool, the cool phase is so short that even with rapid software development tools it is hard to build an ecosystem around the hot new technology in the two weeks between when it has enough traction to be “hot” and when it is so mainstream as to be “burned out.”

Sometime in that brief arc, twitter tools appeared and it does a couple of simple things really well:

• You can display a selectable number of your most recent tweets in your sidebar,
• You can make tweets into blog posts (why? 140 characters is a short post!),
• You can “digest” a day’s worth or a week’s worth of tweets into a post,
• You can tweet your blog entries (like this) in some format we are about to discover,
• It prefixes your tweeted blog entries with a fixed text to prevent a masturbatory circle tweet.

I messed around with twitterfeed, and that too seems cool, doing a similar thing, but it requires a third party site and I generally prefer to have my code local.