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One of the biggest reasons for Twitter’s growth and success is that the Twitter team allowed the service to be morphed and re-shaped by the user-base from the very beginning. We saw it happen in the way that the Twitter community instituted replies, retweets, and #hashtags.

But the real kicker was the fact that Twitter released an open API for developers. That allowed programmers to extend Twitter in lots of different directions and experiment with different tools and utilities to improve Twitter.

In 2007,  Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told ReadWriteWeb, “The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we’ve done with Twitter. It has allowed us, first of all, to keep the service very simple and create a simple API so that developers can build on top of our infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than our ideas.”

This is part two of my three-part series on Twitter. Here are links to the other two parts:

• Part 1: A quick Twitter guide and glossary for business users
• Part 3: Directory: 100 technology experts on Twitter

Today, over three years after Twitter originally launched, there are now thousands of different tools developed from the API, and many of them are extremely useful. Below is my list of the top 15 most useful Twitter tools for business users.

1. Bit.ly

This URL shortener not only shrinks links down to about 20 characters, it also keeps track of your links for you and provides some basic analytics to see how many people click and retweet the links and where those users are coming from.

2. Twitpic

The most popular tool for sharing photos on Twitter is Twitpic, which allows you to take a photo on your mobile phone and email it to a customized Twitpic email address. You simply type your tweet into the subject line of the email. (See also: Flickr2Twitter)

3. Tweetscan

If you’ve ever used Google Alerts, then you’ll understand Tweetscan. It scans Twitter for your keywords and sends you a daily or weekly email of all instances where your keywords were used. This can be especially helpful for tracking brands. However, the service is not free. It costs $20/year.

4. Twitterfeed

Twitter is great for promoting blog posts and other types of content. If you have a blog and you want to automatically send out a tweet every time there’s a new post, then Twitterfeed can do it for you. It also has some nice customization options.

5. TwInbox

If you live in Microsoft Outlook — like many business professionals — and would prefer to interact with Twitter from there, TwInbox integrates Twitter into Outlook. And, the product is free. It was formerly known as OutTwit.

6. CoTweet

CoTweet provides an entire business workflow for companies that are serious about using Twitter for business. CoTweet allows you to manage multiple Twitter accounts, it allows multiple users to access a single account, it can assign tweets to employees for follow-up, it can monitor keywords and trends, it can track clicks to links, and it can allow employees to schedule tweets out into the future. This is not a free tool. (See also: HootSuite)

7. TweetStats

This site provides statistics for individual Twitter users. Simply plug in the person’s Twitter username and you’ll get a plethora of stats, such how often a person tweets, when the person tweets the most, who the person replies to most often, who the person retweets the most and which interface the person used the most to post on Twitter. (See also: TwitterGrader)

8. Twuffer

This free tool allows you to schedule tweets out into the future. For example, I like to post an inspirational quote of the day on Twitter. But sometimes when I’m looking up quotes I’ll come across with several good ones at a time. So, I use Twuffer to spread them out over several days.

9. Twtpoll

One of the most useful things to do on Twitter is to crowd-source a question or ask a quick straw poll. Twtpoll is a tool that makes it very easy to officially do a poll. (See also: StrawPoll)

10. Twendz

If you want to see watch how a keyword has been viewed over time, Twendz provides a very simply and useful chart. The chart is updated in real time. (See also: Twazzup, Twist, and Twittercounter)

For more insights on technology, you can also follow my Twitter stream: @JasonHiner

Jason Hiner is the Editor in Chief of TechRepublic. Previously, he worked as an IT Manager in the health care industry. You can also find him on Twitter, LinkedIn and at JasonHiner.com.

FreeLetterheadTemplates.net has a wide variety of business letterhead and both sophisticated and whimsical stationery for personal use.

The new letterhead additions include several animal designs such as full-color illustrations of butterflies, cats and fish. There is also new baby letterhead, patriotic letterhead, wedding letterhead, religious letterhead and customizable monogrammed letterhead.

“These latest letterhead designs were added in response to user requests,” said Kevin Savetz, the site’s creator. “All of the letterhead is custom-designed for FreeLetterheadTempates.net and is appropriate for holidays, special events and everyday use”

The letterhead is all free to download and print and is in .DOC form so it can be typed upon in Microsoft Word.

Other free letterhead available at the site includes floral letterhead as well as designs for Christmas, Hallloween, Easter and Thanksgiving.

FreeLetterheadTemplates is a sister site to FreePrintableBusinessCards.net and FreePrintableStationery.net, also a part of the FreePrintable.net family Web sites.

There are more than 50 sites in the FreePrintable.net family of free printables sites created by Savetz Publishing, Inc., a company devoted to creating useful and informative web sites of interest to consumers and small businesses.

Kevin Savetz ( savetz@gmail.com)
CEO
Savetz Publishing, Inc.

By Gail Howard

Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer introduced the company’s new search engine, Bing.com, two weeks ago. While the software giant is hopeful the new name and service can stand up to other search engines, it knows its modest share of searches, according to comScore, in the U.S. (8.2 percent) against Google’s 64.2 percent offers a huge challenge. Nevertheless, let me recommend five fresh features on the Bing site, which will help Microsoft to make the march up the search-engine mountain.

1) Microsoft’s Bing.com has faster, more efficient search robots than Google.com.

Microsoft launched its new search engine Bing.com on June 3, 2009. I posted one of my travel Web sites, www.EgyptTravelAdventures.com, on the following day, June 4. By Friday, June 5, Bing.com’s robots had already found and listed my new Egypt Travel Adventures Web site, when using “Egypt Travel Adventures” or “Gail Howard” as a search keyword. As of June 9, Google still has not listed this new Web site. Compared with the new Bing.com, it appears that Google has become “old technology” in the fast-moving, high-tech world.

2) Microsoft’s Bing.com gives more generous Web site description than Google.

Microsoft’s Bing allows title plus 142 characters of description, while Google allows title plus only 133 characters of description.

3) Microsoft’s Bing.com shows extra free information about each Web site.

One of the most valuable and innovative features of Microsoft’s Bing.com is the use of hover text. This gives a Web site an additional 286 characters of descriptive text usually taken from the first paragraph of the Web site. Furthermore, Microsoft’s Bing.com has a hover text description for every single page of a Web site. (And my lottery systems site, www.SmartLuck.com, has several hundred pages!)

4) Microsoft’s Bing.com speeds the searching process in two incredibly unique ways.

Simply slide your mouse down the right of the page and quickly scan the hover text. Below the hover text description are five categories from the site that can be clicked to take you to a specific page of interest. If this use of hover text is a patented process that Google cannot imitate, then Microsoft’s Bing.com will soon become the number one search engine.

5) Microsoft’s Bing.com is a sheer pleasure for advertisers to deal with.

If an advertiser has a question or needs help, a phone call is quickly answered by a knowledgeable American English-speaking rep. Google has no such service – or, rather, no service at all. Google answers e-mailed questions or concerns with canned responses that lead to nowhere. Two years ago, Google started charging me $10 per click for every one of my keywords, including my own name, Gail Howard. After many e-mails back and forth, the problem was never resolved. So, I finally gave up and stopped trying to advertise with Google.

Microsoft’s Bing.com has many other new technical features, but the five points listed above are those that are most important to me business-wise – and personally. Once Web surfers discover the ease and speed of using Microsoft’s Bing, I believe that Google will forever be yesteryear’s hot stock.

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© 2009 Gail Howard ( books@smartluck.com)

Gail Howard, world traveler, is the author of “Lottery Master Guide” and other quality lottery books as well as lotto software with scientific strategies and easy-to-use systems to help the lottery player bet smarter.

Gail Howard, Smart Luck Publishers, Las Vegas, NV 800-945-4245

***Note:  the opinions expressed by the writer do not necessarily reflect the views of BoomerDivaTV.com***