(not a top 10 Essential yet, but definitely about Twitter Tools, just testing out a grabbing headline in the interim)

There are a number of twitter tools out there, with more being created all the time to enhance the twitter experience.

There’s Mr Tweet. Follow @MrTweet and he’ll tell you who you should be following based on your profile and those already in yopur profile.

Marketers may be interested in this new tool. Can’t say I’ve tested it just yet myself, but there’s been a buzz about it – a tweetcast I received is how I found out about it. It’s called Viral Tweets. Apparently they may pull this free version and only offer a paid version and they are requesting testimonials from all who use the free version to help them with this decision.

So you might want to get your free copy of Viral Tweets now.

Shortened urls. You may have already seen shortened urls prior to learning about twitter. They were seen as a convenient way to offer shortened links of sometimes long and awkward web addresses. This purpose also suited marketers that didn’t want to make their affiliate links immediately obvious.

As far as twitter is concerned. Due to it’s 140 characters per tweet restriction, using shortened urls are essential. The oldest (as far as I know) tinyurl, ironically is no longer the shortest short url provider, nor does it offer some of the features useful to twitter users like statistics of the number of clicks on the link, or the ability to monetize through adsense ads.

One of the new players ow.ly offers both. Now I’ve no idea how successful it may be at encouraging click throughs but it doesn’t hurt to try right? If there’s one thing I’ve learnt over recent months, it’s to test out new stuff rather than sit back and watch. Being on twitter is one of those things even if I can’t say that I’m scratching the surface in terms of making good use of it.

twhirl or TweetDeck are also useful tools.

twhirl has a Messenger style window but based around twitter features. twirl also supports FriendFeed, identi.ca, laconic.ca and Seesmic – the latter owning twirl.

TweetDeck has a widescreen, 3 column layout and offers some more flexibility with managing your twitter affairs than twhirl does, depending on if you wish to make use of them.

It’s down to personal taste which one to use. Try them both out and then decide which one or both you wish to keep!