To keep track of all of the Twitter applications and services that are appearing, about a month ago I started to compile a directory of Twitter stuff. This was going quite well (I was up to 224 outline entries) but then a few days ago reader Chris Miller (St. Louis, Mo.) wrote to tell me that he had noticed my "Twitter binge" and suggested that my obsession might be aided and abetted by his Twitter directory at .

He's right. This Web site is a great compendium of all things twitterific and well worth exploring to see what tools and services might be valuable to you. I award EverythingTwitter.com a 5 out of 5 rating.

In the last that analyzed Twitter with Excel I offered readers a copy of the batch files and utility programs I had assembled to grab and analyze Twitter data. What I eventually sent out wasn't quite what I had planned. The system of batch files just wasn't up to the job, so in addition to cURL, I resorted to a suite of ugly little programs I wrote using .

FreeBASIC is a free, open source BASIC compiler for Windows that is mostly QuickBasic-compatible and also provides features such as threading, operator overloading, function overloading and namespaces. FreeBASIC comes with an integrated development environment and, as a way to build quick and dirty tools, it's outstanding.