I’ve been called an attention seeker a couple of times over the last few months, and I’m not 100% sure that it fits into my character. Close friends think I’m the exact opposite – fairly shy actually. But if you look at what I get up to online, then an attention seeker I might be.

The 70 odd friends on facebook will probably testify that they know exactly what I’m doing at any given time, as facebook allows you to import ‘feeds’ from other social websites such as digg, flickr and twitter. So via their news feed they see what I’m currently doing via twitter.com – as this updates my facebook status, they see the websites that I’m viewing when I create a book mark at del.cio.us, or when a news items get dugg at digg.com, recently taken photographs get published to flickr and blipfoto.com and the music I’m listening to gets listed via the scrubbling function at last.fm.

All these websites, added together and tracking my habits would definitely allow anyone to see what i’m up to during the day. but, there is one additional piece of information that would be vital to stalking that is not currently getting monitored – my location. there is one piece of technology that would i love to own that would do this for me – an apple iphone. geo-tagging your photographs is already possible with the right camera – the longitude / latitude is embedded into the jpeg’s EXIF data, some twitter application on the iphone will record your location, and there are some micro-blogging sites such as brightkite.com that make your location and geo-tagging the major part of it’s service.

So, in the future – and not the distant future – it will be a case of what am i doing, what am i listening to, what am i reading and where am i doing all these things.

TwitThis allows you to add a link to your website or blog so that people can tweet about your site through their own twitter account. Combining the same idea as digg.com and delicious where people vote for the content websites, and twitter where people inform followers what they are currently doing – and many do inform their follows of interesting websites that have been found.

TwitThis makes it easy for website owners to make it easy for Twitter users to tweet about their site.

Check it out here; www.twitthis.com

twistori.com is a great example of what the twitter api can be used for, it serves no real purpose – but can be incredibly addictive. select one of the six keywords (love, hate, think, believe, feel, wish) and watch the tweets flow up the screen as the application searches through all the tweets being made in realtime.

this is the first of what will hopefully be a comprehensive list of twitter tools and advise to help your twittering improve. i’ve been using twitter for just over a year (http://twitter.com/martinlucas), it didn’t take long for me to become hooked into what i think is the best social network on the web today.

the first tool is the one i use the most. in my opinion it’s the best os x twitter client – it’s twitterific. the reason twitterific works so well is because it’s simple, it would be very easy to over-complicate an application like this adding lots of various settings and added features (see tweetdeck for example), but icon factory have created an application that gets the job done and is a pleasure to use. there’s also an iphone version for those that have one and want to twitter on the move.