As many you will have seen I do enjoy a good ‘Uncommon Uses’ feature and having already done the likes of Flickr, Podcasts and SMS, today I am going to take a look into the many uncommon uses of Twitter, one of my favorite social media channels out there and which does have a surprising number of uses which move away from the traditional ‘post your opinion’. 

As it turns out there is in fact an enormous number of uses for this fab social media channel and today I want to go into some which you perhaps hadn’t yet considered. Let’s get started. 

1– Chat 

Something which many miss out on when it comes to Tweeting is the fact that much of this can be two way, yet we seem to restrict ourselves to perhaps 2 comments each before moving on. Through both DM’s and @ tweets you can have lengthy conversations with people who you both do and do not know. 

2 – Blogging in Africa 

This is one I find very interesting indeed, in Malawi there are just 50k internet users but there are somewhere in the region of 700,000 mobile phone users, which makes Twitter the ideal platform for blogging purposes, at least this way people will actually end up reading your stuff. 

3 – Automated Weather Report 

A service called Liminal Existance have put together a really cool bot which will send you a message each day with the weather report in your area. Add the bot as a friend for your particular city, or perhaps any other city which you are interested in, and you will get a direct message each morning with will welcome you with a smile and a handy weather report. 

4 – Social Music and Audio 

You should really check out a page such as TwiTunes which is an iTunes plugin that will automatically tweet out the podcasts which you are listening to. 

5 – Social Shopping 

Shopping? On Twitter? That’s right, the wonderful Dealtagger let’s you tweets the things which you are looking for and will help you find the best items online, this is a really handy little tool which you can use on Twitter. 

6 – Home Automation 

This one is going to blow your mind a little, a Twitter bell which is actually going to replace your doorbell at home, thanks to the incredible tool which O’Reilly has put together. 

All told I really think that many people underestimate the useful apps which Twitter feature on their site and there is a real mixed bag. Some of the apps you’ll find are completely useless but fun, others can change the way in which you go social and there are many more which can genuinely improve certain areas of your life. 

Which are your fave uses for Twitter? Let me know down below and I’ll try and get back in touch with you, remember that sharing is caring peeps!