Twitter aggregator Kvetch collects humorous complaints from Twitter users, displays them at random, and lets site visitors vote on how funny they are. Higher-rated comments are supposed to appear more often, though when I checked in the volume of tweets being drawn upon didn't seem large enough for that to make much difference. Obviously, this is a huge potential time sink, but it's also a useful way of coming up with new complaints and insults to share among your friends and colleagues.

The latest entry in the URL-shortening service is Tr.im, and while there are a number of features that might make you switch from your current favourite, the most compelling is that with so few characters in the service's domain name, it creates really tiny URLs. A quick test for shortening the address to to Lifehacker got it down to a mere 17 characters, equivalent to abbreviated web addresses from is.gd. If you're a hard-core character counter, it's probably because you're a user of Twitter or similar services, and Tr.im will automatically send created links directly to your Twitter stream if you like. It also offers stats to keep track of where from and how many folks clicked through the link. A bookmarklet is available to make it quick and easy to trim a site's location while browsing. And you can also give a custom word for the URL or even add tags to improve searchability. Check out our Hive Five of best URL shrinkers for more tiny-fying solutions.

TwiTip rounds up 181 graphics designed to promote your Twitter identity on your Web site, your email signature, or anywhere else you fancy pointing out that you tweet and you're proud of it. (A depressing number do feature birds though.)

Want to see what's being said about a particular topic on Twitter? Monitter lets you track up to three keywords simultaneously, offering continuously updated feeds of posts on Twitter that mention those topics. The simultaneous scrolling of multiple posts makes this more effective than the better-known (and now Twitter-owned) Summize, but be warned: this tool can be a serious drain on your productivity if you latch onto an interesting/distracting subject.

He might not be too keen on Facebook, but our Prime Minister clearly didn't want opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull to steal an advantage from being the most visible Australian politician on Twitter. Kevin Rudd has launched his own Twitter account, though so far there's been no posts of substance. I'm sure he'd appreciate a direct message or two!

One of the earliest examples of the novel in English was written entirely as letters from the protagonist, and most new communications mediums eventually end up being used as a structure for fiction (Lucy Kellaway's Who Moved My Blackberry? is a great example of the email novel genre). Guest blogger Brandon J. Mendelson at TwiTip offers some thoughts on his experience trying to write a "Twitter novel", The Falcon Can Hear The Falconer, posted one sentence at a time via a dedicated Twitter account. If you've always contemplated writing a novel but find the prospect of chapter-by-chapter writing and plotting scary, Twitter's inherent brevity and built-in audience commentary might be just the tonic. And if you've started a volume of social network fiction, share a link in the comments.

In the spirit of the infamous Fake Steve Jobs, Fake Stephen Conroy has arrived on Twitter, making a mockery of our Minister for Communications. As Dan Warne reports at APC, the faux feed is actually the work of Electronic Frontiers Australia, as part of their campaign against the government's clean feed proposal. If you're opposed to that proposal, it's a great addition to your Twitter friends.

When every character counts, the right URL compacting service can mean the difference between saying what you want and desperately trying to fit a coherent thought into a few insufficient words. Read on for a closer look at the five best URL shrinkers.

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While online banking and money management tools can help you get a handle on tracking expenses, keeping track of cash expenses can be more difficult. But if you set up a Twitter account (and I'd recommend making it a private one) you can use Tweet What You Spend to send notes on what and how much you've spent on purchases from your mobile phone. The updates are cataloged on a spending journal, and you can download the information as a spreadsheet so that you can import it into another personal finance application. After the jump, an introductory video from the creators offers a step-by-step video to getting the service set up.

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New webapp Co-op makes keeping track of who's working on what within a small, distributed group easy. Kind of like a private Twitter for small organizations, you post to Co-op what you're working on and see everyone else's updates in a news stream down the page. Made by the same folks who built the Harvest time tracker (our review), Co-op can also calculate how many person hours were spent on a particular project. Co-op also lists what was worked on yesterday, and what's currently being worked on today. Fans of the television show Mad Men will appreciate the screenshot after the jump, which shows Co-op in action at the fictional Sterling Cooper ad agency.

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