have you any wool?

AppStorm is giving away over $750 of Mac software. All you have to do is post link to the contest on Twitter or your website and then let them know. Check it out the AppStorm Mega-Giveaway and be sure to follow them on Twitter.

I happen to love TweetDeck. It’s easily my favorite way to interact with Twitter and a great example of what an Adobe Air app can be. Much like Twitter, however, the application is free and left me wondering how they were going to monetize it. It appears they ‘may’ have found a way with rebranded installations of TweetDeck.

It would appear that the offerings from TechCrunch and Mashable are just the standard TweetDeck client with new logos, backgrounds and an addittional column – assumably an RSS feed. TweetDeck users have been asking for the ability to consume RSS feeds with the client for a while now, but I don’t imagine this is what they had in mind.

Keep in mind there hasn’t been any confirmation, that I know of, that these rebranded apps were indeed paid for by the various companies. I would be interested to find out if that’s the case or if they’re just trading them for advertising as TechCrunch and Mashable are both heavily focused on anything Twitter. I’d be even more interested to see some stats on installs of these variations compared to the standard app.

If you’re a twitter “power user” or even just an average twitter fan, you’ve probably heard of TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a desktop twitter client build on Adobe Air. Most consider it THE premiere twitter client, with Seesmic a close second.

Yesterday, TweetDeck finally released the long awaited TweetDeck for iPhone. I spent the evening toying around with the app and I must say, I’m impressed. Very impressed. The app manages to capture the look and feel of the desktop version, but also expand on it in ways that make sense on the iPhone and take use of its unique interface and user interaction.

Navigating your Incoming Tweets
Column based groups, replies and dms are all back on the iPhone app. The initial view is zoomed out and flicking left and right allows you to easily scroll through each column, each showing the last 4 tweets. Tap a column and it zooms in, revealing the rest of the tweets and allowing you to scroll through them. Zooming in also introduces left and right arrows to cycle through your column list.

Targeting a Specific Tweet
Once you’ve zoomed in to a single column and are viewing the contained tweets, clicking on a single tweet brings up a new screen. From this screen you can reply, retweet, favorite and even email the tweet. On a user level, you can also dm from this screen or click through to the user’s profile.

Groups
Groups are included just like on the desktop client and work the same way. One cool feature pertaining to groups is that when you’re zoomed into particular user’s profile, you can add them to any one or more of your groups from that screen. I think users will find this easier than having a group and trying to plug people into it, especially when you’re following people that you’re not familiar with. You can pull up their profile, see what they’re about and then categorize them from there.

Sync
Perhaps the best innovation is the ability to synchronize your columns across clients. You can now create a TweetDeck account that saves your preferences to the cloud and then syncs them to your iPhone and multiple desktop clients if you so choose.

Integration
The iPhone app supports a host of URL shrinking services and appears to default to bit.ly. It also supports TinyPic and yFrog as its photo services, though I expect more may be added later.

There are many more features not listed here that make this a great twitter app for the iPhone, if not the best. In my testing I did have the app crash a couple of times, though there have already been bug reports submitted to TweetDeck regarding the issues.

Be sure to check out TechCrunch for some video demos of both the desktop and iPhone clients.

If you’re not familiar with Twitter, you’ve obviously been living under a rock – for about three years now. I would try to explain to you what Twitter is, but there are so many other sites that do that – and better.

So once you’re on Twitter, who do you follow? Well, you’d start with you friends more than likely, family, co-workers, etc. But these are people you already know. One of the great things about Twitter is being exposed to all sorts of people that you other would’ve never know about. Sure, the chances of you following a celebrity on Twitter and actually befriending them in real life is slim to none, but it’s still fun. So where do you find the cool people? I use two sites.

We Follow – Is a site by Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, that lists the top Twitter users based on how many followers they have and also has lists of other users based on tags. So you can search the site for tags that interest you, find people who tweet about those topics, and follow them.

Favrd – Not a well know site, but more recently has gained some traffic due to Ashton Kutcher tweeting about it. The premise is this: You can ‘favorite’ tweets on twitter if you find them funny or interesting or what have you. Favrd tracks these tweets and posts them on a leaderboard, based on how many people favorite them. So by checking out the site, you can see find some very funny people, who are getting their tweets favorited all the time.

Update: 6/15

Twibes – Twitter Tribes are essentially just groups of people coming together who are interested in the same thing and would like to communicate with each other. Twibes is a searchable directory of such groups. It also streams tweets from each of the Twibe’s members so you can see what everyone is chatting about.

If you haven’t heard of listable yet, allow me to introduce you. Listable is a website where you can quickly create lists of things, save them, search them, favorite them and print them out in plain text, json or a mysql insert query. The idea is amazingly simplistic and there are some decent lists to be found, such as US States and abbreviations, area codes, etc.

I created an HTML tag list the day it launched and it’s still on the favorites list, which I thought was pretty cool. Yes, that’s a shameless plug. Check it out!