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Eight oddball Twitter utilities

Twitter is a great personal and social communications platform. But that's not all you can use it for.

I've dug through countless services to find some interesting, loopy, and just plain cool tools that allow you to do more than talk to friends. From receiving tweets when your clothes are clean to tracking packages, Twitter is a great place to solve many of the day's tasks.

PIMPY3WASH OK, so maybe you can't use this and it's only designed for one person, but PIMPY3WASH is the neatest washing machine hack I've seen, so I had … Read more

Quickie: Trackthis tracks packages on Twitter

While I try to get Web 2.0 Expo darling du jour Fireball working (still no luck), I thought it'd be worth covering another location service for Twitter: Trackthis. You tell it a package tracking number from FedEx, UPS, USPS, or DHL, and it will Twitter you back whenever there's an update from the shipper.

Yes, there are other ways to get this data, but there are advantages to using Trackthis: First, you can attach a descriptor to your query (like "lamp shade"). Second, you can use Twitter to easily change your message delivery options: you … Read more