Kreativuse.com has put together a nice collection of interestingly designed Twitter status displays from various blogs.

Showcase: Twitter status design

There are some really good ones in there, though it’s not a definitive list. I’ve seen some really cool Twitter status displays, though I never thought to compile a list. I can’t even remember that really cool one I found through Design Float… (It was a word bubble coming from the blog name, that’s all I have to go off. )

If the showcase inspires you to put your Tweets in your blog template, here are a couple methods you can use to display the updates:

• Alex King’s Twitter Tools Plugin
• Remy Sharp’s Lightweight Twitter.js Script

Need to add information from Twitter to a website? I needed to recently, for a project I’m working on, but I wanted to do more than Twitter’s widgets provided. Searching for a viable solution, I discovered Remy Sharp’s Twitter.js.

The script, once included in your page, allows you to use the getTwitters() function to display tweets the way you want them. The statuses are loaded dynamically after the page is done loading, cutting a few seconds off your page load time.

The function has numerous options, as well as a templating variables you can use to display the statuses the way you want. You can show just your tweets (and specify the quantity), or you include your friends’ tweets too. One of my favorite features is the ability to display avatars along with the statuses.

At 3.2k, the script won’t add much to your pages’ loading times either.

Twitter! It’s addicting isn’t it? It can also save you some time if you’re interested in Speedlinking, or provide an easy way to Sideblog.

How? Using Alex King’s amazing plugin Twitter Tools. If you want to get the most out of Twitter blog-wise, you should definitely check-out this WordPress plugin. It does a lot, including Twittering your blog posts and displaying your latest Tweets.

Before we continue, install the Twitter Tools plugin, and configure your login information. If you use Twitter for personal uses, as well as for speedlinking/sideblogging, then you may want to create a secondary account. If you use the Twhirl client to post Tweets, then you’re in luck. It can easily post to more than one Twitter account. (more…)

I’ve been using Twitter for a couple weeks now, and I’ve been pondering this question lately. “Why Twitter?” Pownce has recently come out of private beta, and there hasn’t been a huge number of people moving from Twitter to Pownce. The newer service’s premise is closer to the way I use Twitter than to the way a lot of people do. Pownce is like IM, while Twitter tends to be “I’m eating a sandwich,” saying things for the heck of it.

I’d like to see more people using Pownce, though that causes a problem like we have with IM: People you know use different services, which leaves you using both, trying to manage multiple accounts that essentially do the same thing. Maybe what we need is the equivalent of Jabber, an open standard that can be used to unify the services. (more…)

According to Twitter.com, “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” However, it has the potential to be much more than just “I’m drinking coffee” messages. To be honest, most of us don’t want to know what you’re doing every minute of the day. The Twitter competitor Pownce describes their site much better: “Send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. Create a network of friends and share stuff.” Pownce is marketed as being a communications tool, sort of like public/private IM.

I think of the two services as a sort of IM service that you needn’t be logged-in to receive messages. They’re, to me, public IM. Pownce is leading in that aspect (marketing themselves as an IM-like service rather than a system to tell everyone what you’re doing), but unfortunately, everyone uses Twitter, and therefore sees the notice on the main page that says “What are you doing?” I’d like to see less of that usage.

I recently created a Twitter account, and it’s interesting, though it threatens to be a major time waster (and why must their API have a 70 request per hour limit?). I haven’t actively used IM in years, and I don’t have a cellphone, but Twitter so far has pulled me in. I just use it as an IM service/link-sharing system/Tumbleblog (and I have WSC’s feed auto-posted ).

What is Twitter? It’s IM 2.0.