One of Twitter’s shortcoming is how little information it provides about users, other than a short bio and a URL. So how do you quickly get more insight about particular users?

The answer could be Twho is This, which offers up an extensive list of a person’s social/digital presence, along with their Twitter bio and a link to follow them.

It’s not the prettiest service and it could benefit from offering more information but it’s better than what Twitter offers.

An example below is Mathew Ingram (aka @mathewi). By doing a query on his username, it shows 14 different services in which he has a presence.

Product: Proxlet, a Chrome extension

Job: Eliminates the “noise” from your Twitter stream such as people who broadcast their Foursquare check-ins.

Description: “Using Proxlet, you can block noisy apps, filter annoying hashtags, or temporarily mute annoying users. You can even cut out the chatter altogether & turn Twitter into the ultimate RSS reader by showing only tweets with links. And, we’re adding new Twitter super-powers all the time.”

Cost: Free

Links: http://tweetlevel.edelman.com/
Description: A new measurement service from Edelman that calculates someone’s influence by be slicing, dicing and crunching their Twitter data. It lets people discover their TweetLevel “score”, and displays the number of followers, tag cloud, who influences them, who they influence, and who retweets them. TweetLevel also lets people search by topic based on influence, popularity, engagement and trust.
Our take: An interesting and user-friendly tool for PR agencies and brands looking to get a better handle on who they should be targeting. More of a “lite” product than something offering robust features and analytics.

Link: http://shuu.sh/

Description: A web-based Twitter reader that displays the updates of the people you follow in relation to the frequency of their tweets. It aims to amplify the people that don’t usually get heard, and scale back those with frequent updates.

Our take: Interesting way to put the spotlight on your “quiet” followers who get drowned out by your more, um, enthusiastic followers. It’s a nice complement to TweetDeck or HootSuite but not a replacement.

If you’re looking for a quick way to gauge the mood within the TwitterSphere, Twitter Sentiment offers a simple service to see positive or negative sentiment based on keywords.

For example, here’s the sentiment for IMF head Dominique Strauss-Khan, who was arrested yesterday for allegedly sexually assaulting a chamber made a NYC hotel.

Bottom line: 5/10. A no-frills tool but has some value in providing a quick snapshot of what’s happening.

There are many things that puzzle me about Twitter but once in awhile it rolls out something that delights. A case in point is the upgraded OAuth process, which has a a new look and feel.

What I particularly like is how it now displays the things a Twitter-related application can and can’t do. It makes it a lot easier for Twitter users to understand what’s involved in handing over your information to gain access to a new service.

Here’s what OAuth looks like when I checked out Tweetake, a service that lets you back up your tweets. I noticed the new OAuth when checking out another service, Cadmus. I noticed among the “will be able to” sections that Cadmus could post tweets to my account, which prompted me not to authorize its use.

As you follow more people, it gets increasingly difficult to know who you’re following and their habits. One of the reasons we don’t unfollow more people is a lack of insight and information about our followers.

Given Twitter doesn’t provide much in the way of management tool, there are many third-parties that have stepped into the fray. Among them is ManageFlitter (strange name!), which offers a variety of tools that break down your followers into a variety of buckets.

These buckets include people that you’re follow but who are not following you back, and followers who are inactive, quiet, active, or who don’t have a profile image. ManageFlitter also lets you do search for keywords within the bios of your followers, as well as searches on Twitter.

ManageFlitter offers a suite of basic services for free, and premium services for $12/month. The only problem with the premium package is ManageFlitter doesn’t make it easy to see what’s included, which makes it difficult to know whether it’s worth the money.

Bottom Line: Useful, solid value – 7/10

I have tried lots of Twitter applications for the iPhone although not Twitter’s own iPhone application.

So far, the standard has been TweetDeck because it’s easy to use and provides a nice snapshot of all conversations. If Tweetdeck has any limitations, it is small things such as the ability to edit retweets. But all in all, TweetDeck is the gold standard against which all other Twitter iPhone apps compare.

This is what makes TweetBot so interesting and a viable contender to TweetDeck. It comes with many of the much-needed features as well as providing a user-friendly interface. Some of the strong features include the ability to see related conversation and having search as a standard icon within the navigation suite.

Another strong suite for TweetBot is what you can do with particular tweets – something that separates TweetBot from many rivals. The options for a particular tweet include being able to post a link to it, copying it, e-mailing it to someone and translating it. TweetBot has provided retweets for a specific user, as well as related tweets.

For anyone looking for an alternative to TweetDeck, Echofon, Twitter, et al on the iPhone, TweetBot is well worth checking out. It sells for $1.99 on the iTunes store. TweetBot is made by TapSpots, which has a portfolio of iPhone apps.

It looks like the first salvo in the “battle” between Twitter and the developer ecosystem has been hired. According to an e-mail from Twitter, it has suspended UberTwitter for violating its policies.

Although it did not specify the violations, Twitter said that “we ask applications that work with Twitter to abide by a simple set of rules that we believe are in the interests of our users, and the health and vitality of the Twitter platform as a whole. We often take actions to enforce these rules.

Here’s the e-mail:

Regardless of how you access Twitter, we are dedicated to making Twitter better, faster and more reliable for you. As part of this effort, we ask applications that work with Twitter to abide by a simple set of rules that we believe are in the interests of our users, and the health and vitality of the Twitter platform as a whole. We often take actions to enforce these rules.

We appreciate your continued support of Twitter and regret any inconvenience to you.

One of the games that Twitter-watchers like playing is creating lists of the company’s potential acquisitions now that it has oodles of venture capital cash sitting in a bank. The lists includes companies such as TweetDeck, TwitPic, TwitVid, Seesmic and HootSuite.

Well, we can cross TweetDeck off the list now that it has been purchased by UberMedia for $30-million. For people not familiar with UberMedia, it’s owned by Bill Gross, who started a search company called Overture. And for those of you not familiar with Overture, it created the pay-per-click model that Google “borrowed” to give itself a business model.

Without much attention, Gross has started to build an intriguing portfolio of Twitter products that now includes UberTwitter, a popular Twitter app for the Blackberry and iPhone; UberCurrent, a tool to follow influencers on Twitter; and Twitdroyd, a popular app for Android phones.

The sale of TweetDeck, which has raised $5-million in venture capital, begs a few questions:

1. Why didn’t Twitter buy TweetDeck? Given the declining use of Twitter.com, which is still far from user-friendly despite the recent overhaul, it would have made a lot of sense to buy TweetDeck, the world’s leading Twitter platform. For my clients, it’s the way that I suggest they publish and monitor Twitter, mostly because of how it allows for multiple columns to track keywords. I also like how TweetDeck can be used to publisher updates on other platforms such as Facebook, Foursquare and LinkedIn.

Did Twitter get beat to the punch by Gross? Did TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth not want to sell to Twitter? Or does Twitter has different strategic interests?

2. If not TweetDeck, are there any start-ups that Twitter is interested in buying. Maybe it’s Vancouver-based HootSuite, which is seeing strong growth in terms of users and revenue. HootSuite has a good relationship with Twitter, and it was picked to showcase Twitter’s Promoted Tweets feature.

3. So what does Bill Gross do with TweetDeck, which has been searching for a business model since it was launched to instant acclaim in 2008? Does he start to insert some kind of advertising into the application, including in-stream advertising? Does he create an enterprise version of the product to compete with companies such as HootSuite and CoTweet? Does he create a premium version of TweetDeck with more features? You have to believe there are many people who would happily pay a one-time fee or maybe an annual subscription to access more features.

4. With TweetDeck off the table how long will it be before some of the other popular publishing applications – Seesmic, CoTweet, HootSuite – are snapped up?

For more thoughts on the UberMedia-TweetDeck deal, check out Louis Gray, who notes that it took less than 1,000 days for TweetDeck to go from “public consciousness” to acquisition. Business Insider also has some thoughts.