By Don Dunnington

One of the best ways to discover tools for enhancing your Twitter experience is to watch for tweets from other users. Following are some recent suggestions I’ve found from recommendations by other Twitter users.

OneForty calls itself “A Better Way to Discover Twitter Apps.” As of this writing it tracks 1898 apps that are supposed to make Twitter better. You can view apps by Most Popular, Essentials (described as “a collection of must-have apps to get the most out of Twitter”) and Categories such as analytics, blogging tools, networking and URL shorteners. The site is nicely organized and lists all the popular apps such as TweetDeck and Twhirl desktop clients and HootSuite and TweetFunnel for businesses managing multiple Twitter authors and accounts. It has a user rating system but that can be misleading if there are only one or two raters. Maybe it was just bad timing on my part, but on my last visit the first three apps I clicked on to go to the application’s website, I found their servers were not available or the link took me to the wrong page.

Blogger Rahul Jadhav of Cool Tricks N Tips recommends 16 sites to get free Twitter backgrounds. Also for do-it-yourselfers, take a look at How to Create Custom Twitter Backgrounds by Ben Parr on the Mashable Social Media website.

A number of Twitter users have tweeted this article in Mac World on How to Protect your Privacy on Facebook and Twitter. The article has the usual warnings about not posting pictures or comments you wouldn’t want your mother or a future employer to see 10 years from now.  Another warning of a potentially greater threat is the “tiny-URL attack,” where the URL shorteners so common to Twitter are used to take you to a malicious website.