Here are some twitter tools/tricks that you’ll probably never see in 99% of those ‘twitter lists’ out there. When you have so many applications that do either the same thing but with a different face or don’t really do anything at all, these are some tricks/tools that will actually help you stay productive…especially if you’re a Twitter/data junkie.

TweepML
Before there was twitter lists, there was TweepML. The funny thing is I still use this more than twitter lists because you can easily import/export your lists in csv format. Essentially its simple format designed to help share lists of twitter users. Plus you can auto-follow part or all of TweepML lists directly from within the site. two thumbs up.

TwitPic JSON API
This app was released upon the world by Remy Sharp when he wanted an easier way to pull out all of his uploaded photos from TwitPic (Their API only allows you to upload to the site, not download from your account).Source is available on GitHub.

Twavatar
If you’ve ever developed a twitter app that pulls a users profile picture you’ve undoubtedly run into the problem that occurs every time that they change it, all of a sudden the link doesn’t work and the photo’s gone! Well, fret no more because Damon Cortesi (@dacort) put out an appspot hosted permalink to be able to grab anyone’s updated twitter profile picture. Very useful.

Amy Iris – An AI chat bot for twitter. This one’s a very easily adaptable AI chat bot for twitter. The possibilities are endless for adaption into your projects. Check it out, it’s really a cool framework that they give you.

Now the last one isn’t a tool but rather a Twitter trick:

Want to download ANYONE’s previous 3,200 tweets? Easy! Just fire off the following curl command replacing where it says username with the desired tweeter’s name and you’ll soon have the last 3,200 tweets of theirs all to yourself. This one is also courtesy of @dacort.

curl -O “http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/username.xml?count=100&page=[1-32]“

BUT! If you go visit that url ( twitter.com/hOME), you’ll find that it’s a dormant account that just so happens to have 28k+ followers! Now just for comparison go and try to visit twitter.com/home. See what I’m talking about! It takes you to either your profile page or the main twitter.com homepage!

Here’s another oddity about this account – 95% of @hOME’s followers joined twitter.com on one of two days. Strange coincidence don’t you think?

So what I’m guessing happened was a potential spammer discovered that twitter allowed him to register @hOME so he loaded up 28k of new twitter accounts to make it look like it was a popular user. What happened after that is anybody’s guess, the twitter account has 0 tweets and isn’t following anyone back. If you know anything about this account, please tell us more!

Here’s how it works, you setup whatever information you’d like to be part of your digital ‘business card” and then you’re done. Really, that’s it to participate in this program. And it’s free.

To send someone your business card via SMS, you either tell them to send a txt with your username to 50500 or you can do it yourself by texting “send 3034759204” to 50500 with the 3034759204 being the your new friend.

I can’t imagine sending a potential client or business partner this as a way of contacting me after our initial meeting, but as far as getting your phone number and a brief self-written bio into someone’s phone, this could be great for any after-hours networking.
go check it out for yourself while it’s still free – http://contxts.com

This morning it seems that all of a sudden every result in the US-based Google.com search engine now is tagged as being Malware, even prompting users to not visit the site due to potential harm to their computer. This includes searches for Google.com (which also for some reason are showing Google ads in Spanish).

Google Fail.

Looks like the IE exploit that was released a few days ago is a lot more serious than anyone thought. How serious you might be asking? Well, it’s serious enough to get Microsoft flooding media outlets advising users to switch to ‘an alternative browser.’ That’s pretty intense!

According to slashdot,

The flaw, which affects all versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, is manifested via malware and has infected over 6000 sites thus far. Microsoft states: ‘The vulnerability exists as an invalid pointer reference in the data-binding function of Internet Explorer. When data binding is enabled (which is the default state), it is possible under certain conditions for an object to be released without updating the array length, leaving the potential to access the deleted object’s memory space. This can cause Internet Explorer to exit unexpectedly, in a state that is exploitable.’”

Damage control!