Another phone use

TweetCall is a recently introduced voice-recognition system that takes calls from your phone, converts your spoken words to text, then tweets the result through your account. But it still misses words and can’t parse my friends’ user names. The company claims that in a few weeks, the system will have many more Twitter-centric features including support for user names and hashtags.

Sneaking office tweets

Spreadtweet is a cheeky desktop app that mimics a boring Excel spreadsheet. Coworkers who don’t look too closely won’t realise your spreadsheet’s rows are actually tweets. I use it at home because it packs a lot of tweets into a small space, with no distracting visuals. OutTwit is a more serious application that adds Twitter support into Microsoft Outlook. You can send and read tweets from inside Outlook, and then archive, group and search them as if they were e-mail messages.

Save Time for Tweeting

TweetBeep.com does what the IT guys call alerts. Once programmed, it will search Twitter once an hour and shoot you an e-mail if it finds, say, the name of your company or the latest batch of #swineflu tweets. TweetBeep saves you from spending your day hovering over the advanced search page. Then again, who am I kidding? One of Twitter’s primary attractions is that it gives obsessive webheads something to reload that updates faster than Google News. All these power tools make using Twitter more flexible and more fun. But they aren’t going to send any of us scurrying back to work any sooner.