1. TwitterCounter – Shows you a day-by-day count of your followers and then goes a step further by predicting how many followers you’ll have in the future, based on your current average growth rate. It also shows you graphs for people you follow as well as your tweet volume. They limit stats to 3 months back, however it looks like they’ll be adding some paid functionality that will let you search the lifetime of your account.
2. TweetStats – Divides your Twitter feed into seven delicious graphs. Want to see what day you tweet the most? There’s a graph for that. Want to know which month had the heaviest tweet volume? There’s a graph for that, too. It’ll also tell you who you tweet at most, who you retweet most, and what your favorite flavor of Twitter client is.
3. TweetVolume – Ever wonder exactly how much more you get tweeted about then your competitors? TweetVolume is the better alternative to counting tweets in Tweetdeck. Just put in up to five different keywords and get a snazzy little comparison graph back in a few seconds. It’s slick, fast, and simple. The only problem is that you can’t adjust by date, and the tool is unclear about the time range that it pulls data for.
4. Twitter StreamGraph – StreamGraph is perhaps the coolest tool on this list, IMHO. Basically, it takes a keyword you choose, and then creates a correlation graph for other keywords that appear in association with your keyword by date. That way, you can see not only how frequently your keyword appears on Twitter, but you can also see what keywords appear alongside it. This is nice if you want to see what words people are associating with your brand, or if you’re trying to get a feel for how people are talking about various issues/products/services/etc. Pure, unadulturated awesome. (Caution: Runs a little slow.)
5. Trendistic - Trendistic is another keyword trending tool. It’s nice because it lets you see, very clearly, what the volume has been for whatever keyword you’re searching a day, a week, a month, three months, or six months. It also gives you a list of currently trending keywords on Twitter on the right side of the graph. Simple and straightforward.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. What stats tools do you use and why do you use them?

Once Twitter figured out that my blog had the malware onus placed on it by the almighty Google, they suspended my Twitter account faster than a cat on a hot tin roof (or a poorly mixed metaphor jumping into my brain. There, better).

Anyways, that was three weeks ago, and I’m still shut down, despite having taken the offending link out completely, even though the site is now clean. Which brings me to my point: as much as I want to hate Twitter for taking my account out, I just can’t, and here’s why:

First of all, I get Twitter for free, and I just can’t shake the saying that you get what you pay for. I paid for nothing, and, well, now that’s what I’m getting. Sucky, but strangely just.

Second, they had a pretty good reason to disable the account. The link was bad, no two bones about it. The only thing that would have been better would be if they had notified me first via email and given me a chance to fix the issue. And of course, it would have been way better if they had turned me back on when I fixed the problem.

Third, I love the service. I love it so much that if I ever get my account reactivated, I’ll jump right back into it (after tweeting the obligatory complaint about my long suspension, of course) without any reservations. Honestly, I just want it back.

It’s remarkable to me how addicted I’ve become in the past little while. I miss my Tweeps. I miss being able to hit up new people I just met. I miss the open forum. So anyways, hopefully Twitter will get over hating me so we can be friends again. In the meantime, you can always find me running Mozy’s Twitter account.

1. Tweetdeck

This app is number one for several reasons, not the least of which is because it’s my favorite. After using Twitteriffic for months, I heard about Tweetdeck and signed up, and for me, Twitter changed completely. Now instead of trying to drink from the firehose of tweets that were shooting into my face through Twitteriffic, I had a way to manage the stream of data coming at me. Since then, I’ve looked at a lot of other clients, including the ones that I mention hereafter (obviously) but to me, while a few clients come close, Tweetdeck is still the gold standard of Twitter applications. Things I like about Tweetdeck:

• Multi-pane setup – This lets me see multiple streams of information at the same time. I can keep track of what my friends are saying, what they’re saying to me, and my direct messages, all without having to click so much as a button. And the best part is that I can reorder them whenever and however I choose. Priceless.
• The ability to add @ replies to multiple people at the same time. Most clients delete whatever was in the tweetbox when you hit reply, meaning if you want to reply to multiple people at the same time, you have to cut and paste, or manually type it in. Sometimes it’s the little things.
• Groups – If you’ve got a subset of people you follow because of the specific kind of tweets they give (for example, web designers who tweet) you can just stick ‘em all in a design group so you don’t have to sort through all the other users tweets to find them.

2. Nambu

Nambu is a native Mac client (not Adobe Air) so if you’re a Windows user, just skip on down to number three. OK, that said, Nambu is a great piece of software, and not the memory hog that Tweetdeck is. In addition, it has all the functionality of Tweetdeck, and even allows for multiple account management. It’s been a little bit since I last used it, and even now, the only thing I don’t like as much as Tweetdeck is that I think it’s uglier. Lame reason, I know, but hey, aesthetics count for something, right? Here’s a few things I like about Nambu in particular:

• Multiple view options – You can go multi-pane, single pane, and uniquely, you can go with a sort of Mail-style layout with folders for @replies, searches, etc and a viewing pane.
• More than Twitter – You can also set up FriendFeed, Facebook, Identi.ca, and a couple of other services to your panes. Pretty awesome.
• Easier searches – There’s a search box in the top right corner, and as soon as you hit enter on a search, a column appears with the results. Less clicks=happier me.

3. DestroyTwitter

I don’t remember how I came across DestroyTwitter, but it’s the next closest thing to Tweetdeck. It offers the same multi-pane setup, and gives you a lot of the same functionality. While it struggles with the whole @repy to more than one person at a time thing, and you can’t reorder panes or create more than one search pane, it’s a great app. Here’s a couple of things that DestroyTwitter has that Tweetdeck doesn’t:

• The ability to page through older Tweets – You can go back as far as you want, unlike Tweetdeck, which cuts off at a certain point and won’t go back further.
• Profile Control – You can edit your profile directly through the app; you don’t have to log into Twitter to change your description anymore.
• Twitter API Control – You get finer control over use of the Twitter API, particularly with how often your search results are updated.

Bonus – Tweetgrid

While not necessarily a client in the sense that the other apps I’ve mentioned are, Tweetgrid is still notable for its ability to provide multiple real-time twitter streams, which is indispensable when participating in Twitter events like #GNO or #smbiz.

So this last Friday, startup enthusiast, supermom, and one of the aforementioned new people @StartupPrincess announced that she was taking a weekend-long sabbatical from Twitter. Shortly thereafter, @RyanSMiller showed up with a direct message, enlisting my help to create a @startupprincess appreciation event over the weekend to create a torrent of tweets that she would have to wade through upon logging in at the end of her weekend hiatus. Because that’s what you get when you ignore the Twitter!  After laughing about the awesomeness of the prank, we got to work, and here is the fruit of our labors:

http://wemissstartupprincess.blogspot.com/

But wait, there’s more! We enlisted several of @StartupPrincess’s fans and had them contact their networks and mutual friends, all of which started to tweet with the oh-so-attractive hashtag #spaw.

At the end of the weekend, the joke had spawned over 100 tweets and a large amount of goodwill.

Unfortunately (and fortunately as well, I suppose), it also became not a joke, but rather, a genuine outpouring of appreciation to a major contributor to our Twitter community out here in Utah. Needless to say, @StartupPrincess was thrilled about it and invited a bunch of us over to her house for a movie night. And they all lived happily ever after. The moral of the story? Sometimes it feels good to do something nice, even if it’s inadvertant. The end.