We wouldn’t usually put something on the cool wall that’s “been around a while”, but Twitter has absolutely exploded in the UK in the last 12 months. Rather than giving everyone a thorough rundown of the microblogging engine, we thought it more informative to share some of the tips and important url’s associated with Twitter that we’ve gathered over the last few months.

TwitterFox

A great plugin for FF that delivers twitter updates from those you follow straight to your browser in a “MSN” style popup “chat” window. You can also easily tweet by clicking the Twitter fox icon, which sits on the bottom right of your browser, as well as being able to scroll through older tweets from your contacts. It also includes two tabs for viewing replies to yourself and direct messages.

Twitterfox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5081

Valebrity.com

A constant subject in the Twitter-verse is the valididty of celebrity accounts. Jonathan Ross (@wossy) has taken it upon himself to not only invite as many of his celebrity chums as possible (he talked controversial pal Russell Brand into joining last night @rustyrockets) but also to act as a celebrity twitter investigator by asking said celebrities about their “tweeting” when he has the opportunity.

www.valebrity.com keeps track of these, and any other confirmations, to oust the fakes and confirm the “reals”. However, don’t be afraid to add some of the confirmed “fakes” to your Twitter account, @RichardMadeley is particularly funny.

Twitterholic.com

Twitterholic provides stats of all twitter users, allowing you to see popularity of users, based followers, or tweets, or any stat you wish. It’s a great site for finding popular accounts you may be interested in, or finding just how popular you are in your area.

What better way to kick off the cool wall than to take a look at the new chat plugin we’re using on this website.

If, like us, you spend a great deal of your time in one of the many popular instant messenger programs, plugoo can act as a brilliant communications channel straight to your staff.

Plugoo is a simple flash application that links into all the popular IM’s - Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, GoogleTalk, ICQ, Jabber, enabling a website visitor to talk live through to you.

Plugoo is completely free, just visit http://www.plugoo.com/ and register and you can be set up in minutes.

Happy chatting!