How To Access Twitter From Work

In most cases, especially with financial services based IT organizations, Twitter is blocked. Avid twitter users obviously find a way around to be in touch with their stream throughout the day.

Using mobile phone is always be an option, but with high priced GPRS, working with links is usually not that easy. Especially when you want to share a link with your friends. You also have the option of using Adobe AIR based Twitter clients like TweetDeck, Seesmic, DestroyTwitter etc., but all of these directly connect to Twitter via Twitter's API which gets blocked by the Net Nanny anyway.

Most of it may be known, but I am listing few ways to access Twitter while at work.

iGoogle Gadgets

iGoogle is always a rescue point for geeks. It helps bring in content from various sources on one page.

• Tweete - This gadget is quite useful with host of features which I will let you explore. You can change the theme of the gadget as well.
• BeTwittered - I used this gadget for quite sometime, but got blocked eventually, probably, owing to the usage that the Net Nanny tracked. Advantage with BeTwittered is that, it periodically looks for updates so that you don't need to refresh it yourself. This is not the case with Tweete.

Ginx

Ginx is web-based client for Twitter primarily targeting link management. It has all the features including "retweet" and automatic shortening of URLs. If you are a first time user, you will need an invitation code for accessing Ginx. Unfortunately, they donot have not given provision for me to send out invites, but you may get the invitation code by following @ginx on Twitter.

Mobile Version of Websites

While most of the users are hooked on to Twitter using mobile interfaces like Dabr, Tweete, Slandr etc through their mobile phones, these are great for desktops as well. All these twitter clients are great because they give a compact view and also give features like retweet, search, follow/unfollow etc. Being the mobile friendly version, these websites are quite fast as well. The official mobile version of Twitter is not as flexible as the ones that are mentioned above and usually blocked at work being a sub-domain on Twitter.com

In the case of Slandr, you need to note that the links that you pull up from the stream will be launched in a mobile friendly format (using Google's GWT service) even on your desktop. So if you want to see the full blown version of the website, you will have to manually copy the URL from the address bar and launch it again on another window.

These are the few from my experience, but if you know of more, do let me know through comments.

Happy tweeting till then ... Use responsibly. You get paid for working and not being there on Social Media!

(Note: I would have loved to put up some screenshots, but because Blogger is blocked at work, I am posting this via email which does not work great with images.)