Twitter continues to rise in popularity and dozens of museums now use this micro-blogging service. While we have yet to employ Twitter with one of our museum clients, there are a diverse group of museums large and small already using Twitter. Just search for “museum” on Twitter and you’ll find a number of examples (such as the Discovery Center from Springfield Missouri below).  It seems likely many more museums will follow in the coming months.

Though we’ve just begun to build our own Twitter presence for Ideum and have personally been on Twitter since 2006 (www.twitter.com/jims), although I barely used the service at first. Recently, I’ve been more interested in the service, and I’ve come across a number of utilities that make Twitter much more useful and easier to integrate into other site. Here’s a round up of some of the better ones:

1. TwitterFeed. Last month, I blogged about TwitterFeed and mentioned how I’ve set this to send our latest blog posts from Ideum and featured mixes from RSS Mixer to Twitter.

2. TweetLater. This site allows you to schedule posts to Twitter. You can even set up automated thank you notes to new followers.

3. Ping.fm. You can update Twitter along with other social networking and microblogging sites like; Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, Yahoo! 360, WordPress, and others. An alternative service is Hellotxt.

4. Twitter on Facebook. The Facebook application for Twitter.

5. Twitt.icio.us. A simple barebones utility that lets you import links from your Twitter account into your del.icio.us account.

6. Twitter Tools. A plug-in that integrates Twitter and WordPress.

7. Twitterbar. A Firefox tool bar for posting Websites to Twitter from your browser’s address bar.

8. Tweetr. A desktop utility for Mac and Windows that let’s you update your Twitter status. You can post photos, check updates, and more. Built with Adobe Air.

9. Twitteroo. Send messages to your Twitter account from your desktop for PC.

10. Twitterpost. A Mac-based desktop Twitter tool.

Another point to remember is that your Twitter presence has an RSS feed associated with it. This allows you to add your Twitter stream to any readers or RSS enabled widgets.  Finally, to learn more about Twitter and microblogging in general, you might want to take a look at TweetCrunch which is dedicated to the subject. If you know of any other useful utilities, feel free to add them to the comments.

If you have a Twitter account, you probably already have blog, a Facebook page, a Flickr account, a YouTube account along with other points of presence on the Web. For many of our museum clients, managing this extended presence with limited resources is a constant challenge. So anything that comes along that makes this process easier is of great interest.

This week we created a Twitter site for RSS Mixer. I wanted to find a way to help keep this Twitter site up-to-date without having to manually enter every update. I came across TwitterFeed which takes your RSS Feed and automatically posts updates to Twitter. It is simple to use and while it isn’t a replacement for manually adding updates, it certainly helps and saves you having to manually update every blog post to Twitter.