Twitter in Microsoft Office Outlook!

I’m one of those people who lives in Outlook 2007.  It’s by far the most heavily-used program on my system.

Until just recently, I hadn’t had much use for Twitter.  For one thing, it required me to go out to the web rather than just have the Tweets come in to me in a way where I could manage them and look at them offline.  No more excuses!  I’m tweeting now, because of this great new tool.

It’s called Twinbox, and it’s an Outlook add-in from TechHit.  What it does is provide a toolbar within Outlook, plus an automatic download of tweets from everyone whom I’m following directly into a folder in Outlook.  The toolbar looks like this:

Within Outlook, I see each tweet as though it were an individual email.  Grouping them by the “from” field in Outlook, it keeps the tweets organized, but it also stores them offline so I can look through them even if I don’t have an Internet connection at the time.

The way I handle them is to go through each one, and if the information looks interesting I can either “flag” it in Outlook for action, or move the message to a “To check out…” folder to follow up when I’m online.  I can also use the buttons on the toolbar to respond to the tweets, or put my own out there to annoy the world. :)

The only down side I have found to the program is that I can’t queue up tweets while I’m offline.  Unlike regular emails, I have to be online in order to enter a tweet or a response to one.  (With emails, I can create messages or replies which sit in my Outbox until I go online, but it doesn’t work that way with Twinbox.)

Thus far, it’s the only way I’ve been able to cope with the veritable flood of great bulletins about Windows 7’s launch and all the cool features that people have discovered in the new OS.

Icing on the cake: it’s free!  Details are at htttp://www.TechHit.com/Twinbox/.

For the record, I have no connection whatsoever with TechHit other than the fact that I use the program.

//Steve//