"Just discovered , they describe themselves as Cross Social Network Messaging," writes reader glueglme. "Sounds a like a Twitter Picture, Ask Twitter, Twitter Video, Twitter Maps, Twitter Bots, Twitter Private Group, Twitter Search, Twitter Tiny URL, if they execute it will be something to write about." After reading that, my expectations for TritR.Me were naturally pretty high.

TwitR.me is an ambitious little app. The idea behind it is to act as a translation center for different kinds of messaging. In other words, after you sign in with OpenID (Gmail, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, or the like), you can set up a group of friends and then communicate with that group through TwitR.Me using e-mail, SMS, Twitter, or chat apps; you can even attach sound or image files to those messages. Group members can tell TwitR.me how they want messages conveyed to them. For instance, Twitter might be the best way to reach Bob, while Sally might be more of an e-mail person. All of this preference data is designed to rid you of the hassle of switching among several apps to communicate with your friends. TwitR.me also has a search page that displays tweets containing your keyword on a map of the word. I tested it by punching in "South by Southwest" and saw people from all over the world discussing the upcoming music conference on Twitter.

Verdict: TwitR.me is a broad application; it seems to do a little of everything. And in my somewhat limited testing of it, it seemed to deliver what it promised. Real-time communications like micro-blogging and IM are already ; as they move further up the acceptance curve, translator apps like TwitR.me may end up addressing the immediate needs of a lot of people. I'm giving this application "best in show" honors.

Tweetmeme

" is better than Tweetag," writes reader govtrust. (If I had encountered a reader comment like that five years ago, I would have thought the aliens had taken over.) Staying with the Twitter theme, Tweetmeme is a far simpler app that TwitR.me. Tweetmeme goes out and reads all of the links on Twitter, determines which ones are the most-clicked, and then categorizes the links based on whether they are links to blogs, videos, images, or audio files. The app tells you how many times a link has already been tweeted, and offers you a button that makes it easy to tweet about the same link yourself.