Things about Twitter I'd Like to Know

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to join BlogHer's street team, an informal group of people who like to share their own posts and links with the BlogHer community, share links to BlogHer posts that move them, and generally grow and strengthen the Blogger community. It's not a paid position and there is no obligation on anyone's part to promote or share any stories. I decided to join because I think there are a lot of great articles and posts on the BlogHer site that I might never get around to discovering (much less reading), and now I get a weekly email with links to a bunch of great BlogHer posts that I can read and share, and use as inspiration for my own blog posts.

For example, last week BlogHer had a post explaining some common Twitter terms like DM's and hashtags and twitter streams. It's a great post for people just starting to wade into the twitterverse (that's another term explained in the post). The blogger, Melanie, also has a follow-up Twitter post with more basic Twitter information, and even better, has links to more tutorials for people who want to learn more. Reading these posts made me think of some other Twitter-related questions I've always wanted to ask:


1) Is there anywhere in the blogosphere that lists down upcoming Twitter parties? You can go to sites like Amy's Resourceful Mommy and Jyl's Mom It Forward to see the Twitter parties they're hosting, and that probably takes care of 90% of the Twitter Parties that the mom blogging community cares about, but there are a lot of other parties being hosted by other bloggers (TwitterMoms, for instance) or by smaller bloggers (I've hosted several myself!). I wish there were a place where Twitter party hosts could list their parties so that partygoers like myself could get an idea of what parties they can attend that week.

2) Does anyone know of any twitter tool that counts how many tweets occurred with a certain hashtag between a specific start and end date? I've tried doing this with search.twitter.com, and it does return all the tweets with that hashtag, but it doesn't return a count, so I have to scroll through pages of tweets and count them by hand. Not fun!

3) If you don't have a smart phone, what are some good Twitter apps to use? I use a Samsung Reclaim with a Sprint Mobile service, and I can only manage to get a very basic Twitter app which doesn't do retweets and only lists about 10 tweets in my twitter timeline.

4) How do you insert all those special characters like notes and hearts and smileys into your tweets?

5) Is there any tool around for effectively managing your Twitter followers, i.e. be able to sort them alphabetically, by age, by location, be able to search for a specific follower, etc?

If anyone knows the answer, or knows where to find it, I'd love to hear from you! You can find me here, or where else? on Twitter.