Twitter has grown far beyond its microblogging roots to become a fabulous tool for social messaging, but how can you get the most out of it? Many people use Twitter clients to update their status and read tweets, but there are also a host of useful Twitter widgets that allow you to check your tweets from your blog or even let people retweet your blog entries.
The Most Useful Twitter Widgets:
Twitter Profile Widget
Want to display your Twitter updates on your blog? This is one of two official Twitter widgets that will let you take your status updates and put them up anywhere that allows custom widgets. The great thing about the Twitter Profile Widget is that you can put your tweets on a loop.
Twitter Search Widget
Twitter Search Widget is the second official Twitter widget, and is one of the most useful Twitter widgets out there. It allows you to set up a Twitter search that updates in real time, so you could put it on a personalized start page and get fast updates about your city, a sports team or your favorite actor. Find out more about searching Twitter.
TwitStamp Widget
This neat widget will let you create a stamp of your current Twitter status to use anywhere that takes images, which includes blogs, discussion forums, etc. It doesn't even have to be your tweet that you stamp. You can enter any Twitter profile to turn their latest status update into an image, or even bookmark TwitStamp to easily create Twitter stamps.
Twitter Widget
This simple Twitter widget from Widgetbox is easily customizable, so you can match the background to your blog. You can also easily transport the widget to Facebook, MySpace or any number of social networking profiles or blogging networks like WordPress or Blogger.
Twoxit Widget
This neat little Twitter widget lets you put a piece of code on your website or blog to let users create updates to their own Twitter account. The widget comes in a sidebar style and a footer style, so you can easily fit it to your site.
Retweet Button
Move over Digg, there's a new article badge in town. Retweet buttons are becoming increasingly popular for blogs and news articles, and they are relatively simple to install. You can put these buttons on your website, blog, embed them in email or even put them in your RSS feed.