In case you have not noticed, Twitter has been going through many changes recently. One could argue that it has moved to a whole new level. The new interface makes interacting with others and finding new people to connect with a whole lot easier. Here are 5 things you can do to get even more out of Twitter:

• track activities: tracking others’ activities on Twitter is a whole lot easier these days. Just go to #Discover and browse through user activities on that page.
• embed tweets: did you know that you can now embed live tweets in your blog? You can do so by expanding the tweet and clicking on details link and grabbing the provided code. You can style these tweets easily.
• discover: the new Twitter interface lets you discover new, interesting users easier. You can take Twitter’s suggestions or search for users by category. Twitter displays the top stories under Discover tab as well.
• find tweet interactions: want to know how many times your tweets have been favorited or retweeted? Now you can see these numbers by expanding tweets.
• connect with your contacts: the new UI lets you easily follow who is interacting with you and your brand on Twitter (the new brand pages are going to be very exciting too). Under the new interface, you can keep track of mentions and other interactions easily.

Twitter has stepped up its game dramatically in the past few months. It will need to continue doing so to stay relevant in 2012 and beyond. The new updates are a good start.

In order to use this tool, you need to provide it with your Twitter username. There is no need to connect your account, which is nice. This tool provides you with the avatars used by the folks not following you. You can always export the data you get here to do some more analysis. FoF can show you more information on your fans and followers too.

So why would you want you use this tool? If you have used aut0-follow tools in the past, this application can help you clean your profile. I am not suggesting you should unfollow everybody who is not following you. At the same time, there is no reason to follow people who are in it just to game the numbers.

The Archivist is a great way to find posts on a certain topic. It provides you with the top URLs and words used in the tweets relevant to your search query. The Archivist can help users perfect their search queries and even come up with other topics to research on. The service even shows the clients used by folks to tweet / retweet content.

All in all, The Archivist is a very solid research tool for Twitter. It not only helps you find new posts and topics for your research,. it provides you with data downloads. The perfect tool for those mining for info-gold on Twitter.

Formulists lets you create lists to sort your followers, find new people to follow, and even track your interactions. It has various templates that you can take advantage of to create living, dynamic lists. The nice thing about Formulists is that it can help you save time managing your Twitter account. You don’t want just every Twitter to be added to your lists, so you want to pay attention to some of the settings with the templates. Still, it’s nice to have an easy way to keep track of things on Twitter without spending more a couple of minute doing it.

Many Twitter users are too obsessed with their followers and those who they are following. Formulists can help you find out who has recently followed you, listed you, and unfollowed you. That way you know who to follow back or unfollow.

Formulists is not perfect. It did crash on me a couple of times when I was playing with its lists. The custom template feature could be better too. Still, it demonstrates the power of Twitter lists. There are all kinds of things one can do with Twitter lists (e.g. finding content and people & building relationships). Thanks to this service, you get to outsource some of that process.

Flipboard: a wonderful tool for iPad owners to keep up with the latest developments in social media. Flipboard makes it much easier to keep up with your social accounts on your tablet.

Klout: a wonderful tool that analyzes your Twitter account and gives you quick tips and pointers on how to improve your Twitter presence.

Plixi: a fun service that lets you share your photos with the world using Twitter and Facebook (the service was known as TweetPhoto).

Zocial.tv: a service that lets you figure out which videos are trending (being shared most often) on Twitter. Could give you some ideas on what people are interested to consume on Twitter.

Twitume: maybe you don’t own a business and just want to use Twitter to find a job? Twitume is an interesting service that lets job hunters and recruiters connect on Twitter.

There are hundreds of other tools that Twitter fans can use to get the most out of this service. But you can’t use them all, can you?

Social media has become one of the best venues to look for jobs and new opportunities. Since you are dealing with real people on Twitter, you are more likely to find out about open opportunities and hear back from people who are on Twitter. And let’s not forget that Twitter provides you with the chance to find positions that are not being talked about on top job sites. So it never hurts to have your resume ready to go for those Twitter opportunities. That’s where TwitRes comes into play. It’s a very simple to use but essential service for job seekers who want to take advantage of the social media to find new job opportunities.

TwitRes targets both job hunters and recruiters. Job hunters can easily log on to the service by using their Twitter credentials. Resumes can be uploaded in Microsoft word, PDF, or text format. The service keeps track of uploaded resume and gathers statistics for them. You can use the service to find out how many people have viewed your resume and ask for feedback from Twitter community as well.

TwitRes makes life easy for job recruiters as well. They can take advantage of this service to look for candidates and find talent on Twitter. As a recruiter or someone who’s looking to hire someone for your small business, you want to make sure you add the proper hash-tags (#) to your job tweets. So don’t forget about location and skill hash tags.

TwitRes does not guarantee you a job nor it can determine the best candidate for a job. But it does make life easy for anyone who’s looking to take advantage of Twitter to hire someone or get hired. It’s a free service, so it never hurts to try.

Being involved on Twitter is more than posting philosophical quotes or retweeting what others have to say. Twitter is an extremely powerful tool for businesses who know how to use it. There are plenty of ways that businesses can get value out of Twitter. They can listen to what people have to say about their niche and pick up ideas for future ideas. They can also track their reputation on Twitter. Best of all, they can provide real-time support to customers via Twitter. That’s where Followbase comes in. It’s an interesting service that lets you get in touch with other companies’ support teams and get help via Twitter.

FollowBase is pretty simple to work with. It’s essentially designed to help people get the support they need via Twitter. If you happen to be a business owner, you can just add your company by entering the Twitter account for your business. The fun part starts when you claim your forum on FollowBase. That will allow you to communicate with your customers more effectively and keep the spammers out as well.

The service is also helpful if you want to find out more about your competitors and how they handle their customer service on Twitter. It can certainly be used as a learning tool. The forum is pretty flexible as you can customize the look and feel, add employees, and even upload your company logo to the site.

So why is FollowBase important? It’s more the concept here that matters rather than the execution. Twitter has applications for business and can help small & big businesses support their customers more effectively. Sooner rather than later not having a Twitter account for your business will be similar to not having a business phone #. So if you haven’t taken advantage of Twitter already, now’s a good time to start.

You know it was bound to happen. Twitter has been looking at multiple ways to generate revenue and take its business to the next level. So are tweeters. Sponsored Tweets is a cool service that brings advertisers and Twitter publishers together and let tweeters make money from their sponsored tweets while enabling advertisers to reach out to influential users in the community to push their message out. Here is how the service works. Advertisers create opportunities and tweeters take advantage of these opportunities to make money on Twitter. You will need to disclose that you are being sponsored by someone so the transparency is there. Here is a demonstration of how this service works:

When I first heard about this service, I was very skeptical about it. I am by no means a big fan of advertising on Twitter with my own tweets. Twitter is not a direct revenue channel for me or my business, but it is a great traffic driver for our products and the content our company produces. I have to say I was surprised by the number of celebrity and popular twitterers who are taking advantage of this service to make a few bucks online. If you happen to be into advertising on Twitter, this service can certainly come in handy.

Think about it. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get the message out about your product to thousands of folks on Twitter by partnering up with a Twitter user who has 200,000 followers? Maybe you want to work with someone who has millions of followers. Those sponsored tweets will cost you but just think about the number of people who will instantly check your product and may even give you feedback on your work.

I found the advertising interface to be very easy to use and intuitive. The fact that you can define how much you want to pay for your tweets and when you want them to go live makes this channel well worth a test.

You can also target your potential partners with tags and language. I have just started testing this service but choosing your tweeting hours is the best option to go. Just make sure you match your hours to the location you are targeting (the time is based on Eastern Time for now).

Sponsored Tweets is a very interesting service for advertisers and certainly worth a try. While I admire how the service is put together, I can’t see myself making money off of it by tweeting sponsored tweets. At the same time, if you have a product that you want to push in front of a large community, this service is well worth a test.

So here is how the feature works. You see a story that you want to retweet, you click on the retweet button, and Twitter asks you whether you want to retweet the story. Twitter does the rest for you.

The Retweet feature is certainly convenient and fun to play with. Keep in mind that it’s a new feature so it will take some time for Twitter to get everything right. But while many are excited about the introduction of the new feature, there are people who are upset about the way Twitter has implemented the feature and for a good reason. Twitter does not allow you to add your own take on these stories when you retweet a post. So essentially, you post a piece of article with all the attributions but without your take on it. It’s also regrettable that you can only see RTs from the people you follow. So if you are not following the top dogs in your niche, you are not going to see the stories that they like.

The first issue is not something that can’t be fixed. The way Twitter has implemented it can certainly make things get done faster. I do believe that Twitter needs to add another option to the above pop-up to allow us to add our own take to stories. Maybe we will see that when the feature is released to everyone. The 2nd feature and the way it’s been implemented are actually something I do agree with. If you are not following someone on Twitter, you probably don’t want to hear from them. Besides, you don’t have to be following everyone to get those top stories on your timeline. If you are following people who truly provide value in your niche, there is a good chance they’ll catch the top stories and tweets from other top people around the world. So you don’t have to follow everyone in the world to see those top retweets. If those who you follow catch them, you will as well. That’s why you should only follow people who provide real value. There are just too many folks who follow a lot of people in hope of getting followed back. That’s not what Twitter was designed for. So I wouldn’t put any blame on Twitter for how it has implemented the second feature.

The good news is that we are finally going to get the retweet button on Twitter. It may need some work and not everyone is going to agree with everything, but it’s a nice step forward.

What’s your take: do you have an issue with how Twitter has implemented the retweet feature?

I have to admit. I have never tried dating, and I am not so tempted by services such as eHarmony and Chemistry. But there are people who have used these services to find a date and even start a serious, long-term relationship. But when I first hear of gelato, I thought it’d be interesting to see what it’s all about. gelato is not your everyday dating site. It’s a social-media based dating service that lets you find people based on their information on Twitter and Facebook. So unlike eHarmony and other top dating sites, gealto lets you figure out what people really talk about. The system can probably be gamed but that is the case with other dating sites as well.

In order to get gelato to work, you will need fill out a short information sheet. You basically let others know what you are interested in and what you want gelato to pull from your social networking accounts.

Once you are signed up, you can go through the profiles that are available in the system to see whether you find something interesting.

You got to love the tagging system used in this system as well. The service will show your tag cloud on your profile so others can figure out what you are all about. People can also tell what type of relationship you are interested in which always helps.

All in all, gelato is based on an interesting concept that will surely be adopted at some level by the top players in the online dating business. I can’t tell you that you’ll get results with gelato. I have never tried online dating and don’t believe in it. But maybe you can use it to find more friends online. The service certainly seems interesting on the surface, and a concept we will see more of in the near future.