You can find that plugin here: Twitter Tools StatusNet (and should be able to find it soon on wordpress.org).

What I hadn’t realized at the time was just how Twitter Tools itself worked, and what that meant about the StatusNet plugin.

Twitter Tools follows all of your tweets, not just those which you enter via WordPress or generate as new blog post notifications. What this means is that using Twitter Tools in combination with the StatusNet plugin, everything you post on Twitter gets also posted to the StatusNet instance you’ve configured.

Everything you post on Twitter, regardless of it’s source: desktop client, SMS, web client, etc.

This means you’ve got to be careful. If you use Identi.ca, for example, and have your Identi.ca account configured to cross post to Twitter (which is a popular option) you’ll create a loop. You post to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, where Twitter Tools finds it and (with my plugin in place) cross posts to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, and so on (repeat until someone tells you your account has gone crazy).

So, you’ve got to decide which service (Twitter or StatusNet) you intend to actually post to, and which you want automatically fed cross posts.

• Post to Twitter, auto-cross-post to StatusNet. This is what I’ve decided to do. I post to twitter, through all the usual methods, and I let Twitter Tools cross post my tweets to Identi.ca. I have different friends/followers on each, and this way the conversation gets shared.
• Post to StatusNet, auto-cross-post to Twitter. This you can do with existing StatusNet instances, and if you do, be sure NOT to install the StatusNet plugin for Twitter Tools.

Hope some of you find the option useful.

Brands often use this approach to track mentions of their products and companies, developers can use it to track mentions of their favorite languages, frameworks, and open source projects, and anyone can use it to track mentions of their hometown, their own twitter username (to make sure you don’t miss any @replies).

TweetScan is one of several services offering email alerts based on keywords

Personally, I’ve been using TweetScan to track these terms I’m interested in:

1. Optaros
2. open source
3. Newburyport
4. vegan
5. jeckman

To avoid the “stalker effect” I don’t immediately reach out and @reply to anyone who mentions any of these terms, though I do often follow them to see if it is a common part of their conversation, which would suggest I might be interested in their stream.

Unfortunately, as the folks behind Tweetscan recently announced, they’re going to start charging for this service:

Tweet Scan is due for some improvements and the volume of queries and emails we’re handling isn’t sustainable on a hobby budget. So we’re going to start requiring a small annual payment to keep an account with us.

Please use the subscribe link below and let’s take this site to the next level! It’s $15 per year if you sign up by April 22nd. After that it’ll be $20 per year.

I can certainly understand the need to monetize an application that becomes popular and starts to generate a high volume of usage, but I’m not yet ready to pay for an account for personal use, so I found a few alternatives. (Note Tweetscan can also enable you to download you tweets since December 2007, and can be used as a live Twitter search engine).

TweetBeep

TweetBeep also sends email alerts based on the mention of specific keywords in Twitter, and can track specific URLs, whether they have been url shortened or not. TweetBeep lets you set frequency of alerts as well.

(It seems, though I haven’t verified this yet in practice, that the alerts based on domains – so an alert set for any reference to optaros.com or openparenthesis.org, for example – can’t be scheduled into hourly/daily as keyword alerts can, but are set to “live” – which may mean immediate? This might be an issue if you have a domain frequently referenced in Twitter streams.)

TweetLater

TweetLater, which is most well known for its “schedule a tweet for posting at a later time” feature, also provides a feature they describe as “Track keywords on Twitter” as part of their free account. They also provide other features:

• Auto DM to new followers (which I find frankly annoying)
• Automated following of folks who follow you (which I don’t do, but is not annoying)
• Automated unfollowing of those who unfollow you (hmm, that might be interesting)
• Vet new followers (this one I haven’t tried yet – not quite clear to me what it is except perhaps an easier way to act on new followers – follow, ignore, or block – rather than the one at a time approach twitter offers)

TweetLater also offers a professional / premium account for $29.97 a month which adds other features and is worth checking out for serious users.

What tools are you using to monitor the twittersphere?

It’s got some interesting stats, though I’d wonder if the self-selecting audience of folks who tried Twitter Grader isn’t a bigger problem in terms of the basis of the analysis.

More charts in the report itself, but here are two I found interesting – histograms of twitterers by number of followers and number following:

That puts me in a pretty small minority in both cases. Does that make me?:

a) Weird
b) Extraordinarily prescient
c) Just Plain Nuts
d) ______

Here’s a shortlist of those projects I’m aware of – please do let me know in the comments if there are others I’ve missed.

• Sweetter 2.0 – an “open source and fun microbloging service . . . being develop[ed] by SUGUS (group of GNU users from the University of Seville).” Go here for code. Based on TurboGears, a python-based web application framework. Affero GPL (AGPL)
• Jisko – Affero GPL (AGPL) licensed framework for microblogging, PHP 5 and MySQL. I had to use Google Translation to try to read the wiki, as I no hablo espanol.
• Yonkly – written in ASP.NET by Emad Ibrahim. Code hasn’t yet been fully released but you can get an early version here. (License is not yet specified though it is described as “open source.”)
• Twoorl – a GPL (3) implementation of a microblogging service in Erlang using ErlyWeb. Started (and entirely written?) by Yariv Sadan
• Prologue – not really a microblogging platform per se, but a WordPress Theme which could be used as a microblogging platform. (Note that the Prologue post itself kills Firefox 3 for me – caveat browser). Prologue is available under the GPL, as is WordPress itself.
• Laconica, which is the software which powers Identi.ca. Also Affero GPL (AGPL). This is perhaps the most robust, and is based on the Open Micro Blogging protocol. It also embeds creative commons licensing on the content people publish, which I think is great but others may have issues with.

Am I missing other open source twitter approaches?

Has anyone created a Movable Type theme which does microblogging?

Ultimately, this will likely be the distributed, open microblogging platform twitter fans have been waiting for (though the community itself seems mostly to be sticking with Twitter, fail whale and all).

For now, it’s just fun to play around with.

I just releases an Identi.ca action stream plugin – get version 1.0 on my Movable Type Action Streams Plugins page.

Here’s what the output looks like: