Only Network

I’ve been playing with Twitter for some time now and I think it’s great that there’s an entire ecosystem out there that’s growing around it. And I love the fact that there are a number of WordPress plugins that make it easier and easier to integrate Twitter with WordPress. These are the top 5 Twitter plugins on my radar, which have been excellent for me in the past and which I’ll keep using on new blogs:

• Twitter Tools: I’ve been using this since I signed up to Twitter. It’s a complete package that lets you Tweet as you blog, generates posts with a digest of your Tweets, displays your Twitter feed in your sidebar and even lets you tweet straight from your blog. It’s a complete solutions that’s quickly becoming one of the first plugins I install on a new blog.
• Tweet This: This plugin automatically adds a link for the user to tweet about a particular post or page. The default mechanism uses a cool bird in the top right-hand corner of the post, but you can switch this to an unobtrusive link at the bottom of the post.
• TweetRoll: A sidebar widget that invites people to follow you and shows the avatars of the last few people you followed. You can see it running in the sidebar on this blog.
• TwitIp-ID: This plugin integrates Twitter very nicely with your commenting system. It allows commentators to specify their Twitter ID as they leave comments and then displays a cute icon so that someone can follow them easily.
• Tweetbacks: An excellent plugin that scans Twitter and picks up any tweets that refer to posts on your blog. It then adds these Tweets to your comments so that they can be displayed on your blog together with comments and trackbacks. As essential as a tv mount for anyone with an LCD TV.

These are a great set of plugins and worth consideration by anyone who uses Twitter and blogs on WordPress. Check them out and while you’re at it, follow me on Twitter