For many people, myself included, logging into the Twitter website on a regular basis can be quite boring and frustrating. Far better to have your Twitter feed on your desktop like an instant message (IM) tool so you can see the latest tweets as they come in and still get on with your work when nothing new is happening.

With this in mind I went searching for some desktop Twitter tools and see which worked well for me.

The first application I tried was Tweetr which is available both for PCs and Macs and, like most Twitter-related applications, is free to use.

I have to admit that I really like Tweetr. The box is reasonably small and unobtrusive, yet clear and simple in it’s layout. Furthermore whenever a new tweet is added by someone I am following, I get a little popup appearing in the top right of my screen to tell me about it which is nice.

Basic tweeting is nice and easy because you just need to type into the box at the bottom and you’re done. It also gives you the opportunity to upload files or images by clicking on the simple icons at the top of the page.

Stumble Upon is one of my favourite online services and I use FriendFeed to live stream the sites that I like to my main blog. In that way, visitors have a chance to see what sites I like, what I’ve been visiting and can interact with me on Stumble Upon.

What I love about SU is just how easy it is to track down fantastic sites that tyou’ve never seen before. The “human edited” element of the content is important to me. In contrast to most of the major search engines, the sites that do best in SU are simply those that provide the absolute best user experience rather than the ones that know the most powerful SEO techniques.

But there are two weaknesses to Stumble Upon which I feel are causing some damage to the service. The first of these is reasonably minor - people submitting their sales sites to Stumble Upon. SU isn’t the plave to submit hardsell sales letters and shopping carts. People visit SU for entertainment, not to be sold to, but it is simple enough to bury these sites as they arise.

The harder option is that once a site has been submitted to Stumble Upon, you cannot change the category it is in. This means that if you had a website on dog training, and deliberately submitted all your competitors sites to the music category, not only would music people have little interest in their site, but they couldn’t then change the category.

Now I will say to be fair that Stumble Upon does give you the option to request a change of category, but I personally requested a change of Google’s keyword tool out of the “Africa” section several months ago and to date SU has made no changes. And as I say, that is to Google.

So the evidence suggests that once you are in a category, that’s where you’ll stay. Come on Stumble Upon - sort out this floor to make the service even better.

Evidence that Twitter is becoming ever more mainstream comes from an anti-bullying website which is actually requesting people’s opinions on the subject by using Twitter.

Take a look at the following Google Ad that I found recently:

While Twitter is gaining in popularity all the time, it is a rather different beast to a blog, and neither really replaces the other. Twitter, as a micro-blogging service, is ideal for letting your contacts know about useful links, new blog posts and general life streaming comments. In contrast, your blog is the place for more lengthy posts and interactive elements.

For example, if I were using my blog and Twitter to keep my family updated while away travelling, it is likely my blog I would use for details posts on where I am and what I have been up to. It is likely here that I would upload the majority of my pictures too.

But I would use Twitter like email to fire off a quick message about a new blog post, or to let them know I had arrived in my next destination safely.

What this means is that there is a certain amount of crossover here. It might be useful to be able to add your tweets to your blog from time to time to keep readers up to date with your latest conversations. Or it might be beneficial to let your Twitter followers know that you have added a new post to your blog.

I recently struggled with this very problem and I’m pleased to say that I came up with a very pleasing (and free!) answer.

A new Wordpress plugin known as Twitter Tools will provide the very integration we have been talking about.

Having tested it out myself I’m really pleased with the results I’ve been seeing of “cross pollinating” my blogging and Twittering.

A key aspect to success when losing weight - or indeed trying to make any major change in your life - is accountability. Couple this with making is as easy as possible to be accountable and Twitter becomes a perfect tool to help you lose weight.

Essentially, what you need to do is to set up your own Twitter account specifically to use while on your diet. You then let a number of people know that you are going to lose weight, and how you’re going to do it. And then you simply Twitter your experinces as you go.

Every time you eat something or exercise (or don’t exercise!) you tweet it, so all your followers know that you are still on the straight and narrow. Every single thing you eat gets tweeted and so everyone knows you are doing exactly as you should be, in real time.

And if and when you do break the rules and eat something you shouldn’t, be honest enough to tweet that too. I guarantee you that if you promise yourself you will tweet everything about your diet - both good and bad - the simple fact of being held accountable by a large number of people will greatly increase your chances fo success.

And don’t forget that if you ever start to feel weak and think that you might quit your diet, there will be dozens of people following you who you can call on for advice or emotional support.

In the early days of the search engine, there were dozens of competitors. Anybody remember Alta Vista, Lycos, GoTo or Hotbot? But over time, Google and to a lesser degree Yahoo, started to gain in popularity and the other search engines either got bought up or went bust.

Web 2.0 sites are still in their infancy and while Facebook is the clear winner at the moment in terms of social networking, the market is still tremendously fragmented. Many of use use Flickr for photos, YouTube for videos, Technorati for blogs and so on.

As Web 2.0 sites are all about interaction, we are increasingly finding that we have accounts at dozens of different sites designed for different purposes and while no doubt that list will shrink over time, just as the search engine worl did, for now we need to remember a lot fo details.

Enter Friendfeed. Friendfeed had the marvellous idea of helping you to tie all your Web 2.0 accounts together into one single account. Once you have signed up, Friendfeed provide you with a page much like a Twitter page where you can add details of your accounts at Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Stumble Upon and dozens of other similar properties.

In this way, your online friends can easily see *all* your networking activity in one single, neat place.

Personally, I’ve been using Friendfeed for some time and I love the way it simplifies life for my network. I have added their rather clever widget to my blog so that my friends can see all my activity at once. Whether I upload a video to YouTube, add a favourite to Digg or add a new tweet to Twitter, my friends will know. Even better, in true Web 2.0 form they can then choose to interact with me in the way that suits them rather than me.

As a technology, Twitter only allows you to upload text of up to 140 characters. But many of us would understantably like to be able to upload photos that we have taken to Twitter as a quick and easy way to show them to friends.

The easiest way to do this is using the free service at Twitpic.

For a pleasant change, you don’t need ot sign up for this new service all over again and enter dozens of details about yourself, confirm your email address and all that rubbish. Instead, Twitpic is interfaced with the main Twitter site itself, so if you already have a Twitter account, you also already have a Twitpic account whether you know about it or not.

You can upload pictures to Twitter using Twitpic in three main ways.

Firstly, you can simply log into the Twitpics site and then select the “Upload Photo” option at the top of the page. Find the picture you want to upload on your computer, create a short message and then upload it and bingo! it will go live on your Twitter page.

Secondly, you can send pictures through to your own unique email address which means you can upload pictures either by email itself or by sending them from your cell phone.

Lastly, a number of third-party Twitter applications will allow you to upload pictures using the Twitpic interface.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, Twitter suffered an outage that meant many Twitter users lost much of the data from their accounts. Followers and tweets all vanished with a puff of smoke. And bearing in mind our ever increasing reliable on Twitter, this could really cause a lot of anguish.

So it is that I recommend you consider backing up your Twitter account on a regular basis.

To this end I’ve been experimenting recently with some Twitter backup services to see what I think. And of the options I’ve found so far, I’ve got a personal favourite.

Tweetake is a free and super-simple service which will log into your Twitter account, download all the information from it and then allow you to save that as a tidy Excel spreadsheet on your computer. The only weakness I can see is that it is a manual process rather than allowing automatic weekly backups which I think would be a really nice feature. Hopefully Tweetake will implement that in the near future.

But for now you just enter your Twitter username and password and then select what information from your account you’d like to save. Then hey presto you just save the resultant file onto your computer and you’re all done!

Twitter can be viewed as millions of publically-viewable conversations about pretty much any topic under the sun. And because these are actual human discussions, occuring in real time, that we can evesdrop on, it creates an amazing opportunity for those in the know.

Rather than searching the search engines for a keyword phrase where you will likely discover the websites created by people with the most SEO knowledge, you can instead search real-time conversations for what you are interested in.

To use the service you just need to head over to http://search.twitter.com.

Here you can search for real conversations and then either respond to those conversations yourself or start following those people regularly tweeting about the subjects you are interested in.

For the initiated, Stumble Upon is a service which displays millions of different user-submitted webpages.

Users sign up for an account and then download the toolbar which will then display in their browser. Whenever they find a web page they like, they can click the “like” button. There is also a “dislike” button for the alternative opinion. Lastly there is a “Stumble” button which will bring up a suggested website that someone else has marked as “like”.

The more you use the service, the more accurate the suggestions become for you and as someone who has been using it for a few years now I always end up finding some amazing articles, photos and resources. It;s not just a great entertainment tool for finding the best sites out there, but because all the sites are human-edited, I like to use it as a search engine too, knowing that the top sites will have been “liked” by loads of people.

Because it is so easy to click the “like” button in your browser at any point in time it is also a super-simple way to record the websites that you like as you come across them. And being a web 2.0 site, you also have a profil page at SU which records every site you rate - either as “like” or “dislike”.

Stumble Upon is therefore the easiest and most enjoyable way I have personally found to life stream my web favourites as they happen to other interested individuals. Why not give it a try today?