Everyday lots of images are being posted on Twitter. To help you search and browser those images Twitcaps arrives! Twitcaps is a real-time image search engine for Twitter. This startup allows you to search, browse and share the latest images posted on Twitter via any of the popular Twitter image sharing services. From the Twitcaps interface, you can capture an image for later use, re-tweet the image on your own Twitter feed, or share the image on any other social linking services.

Twitcaps delivers real-time search experience by utilizing the Twitter Search API. It fetches Twitter results in 10 seconds interval. For the search functionality it supports any valid Twitter search operators. For example, twitter search, “happy hour”, #haiku, to:techcrunch, @mashable etc. Right now, Twitcaps supports the following image services - Twitpic, yFrog, Twitgoo, flickr, img.ly, tweetPhoto and MobyPicture.

Twitcaps have an unique feature called “Capture”, which allows you to create copy of an image posted on Twitter and re-tweet it under your own account. To use this feature, you need to click the “Capture this pic” button that appears in the upper left corner of the full-view of an image. The captured image is uploaded as a new image to Twitpic service and you can browse all of the images you have captured on Twitcaps by clicking the “My Captures” button on the main toolbar.

There is another feature called “MetaCap”, which allows you to capture all of the images you are currently viewing on Twitcaps. It is like a screenshot and will be saved to your account if you are logged in.

Twitcaps also offers RSS feed of the image stream. By default there are two RSS feeds for latest images and popular images. You can also access an RSS feed with any filters you have applied to your Twitter account by adding your Twitter username to the RSS url.

Twitcaps is a perfect tool for image lovers. As it is still in Beta, there may be some glitches (though I didn’t experienced any during testing). Want some more features? Don’t worry! Soon, some new features such as full-screen, passive slide-show mode, capture categories, capture slideshows will be added to this Twitter image search engine. One more thing! As it displays latest images in real-time, some NSFW images may appear. Beware!

Visit: http://twitcaps.com

Finally, Twitter is starting the process of verifying user accounts! According to an official blog post, soon Twitter will test a new feature called ‘Verified Accounts’, which is expected to eliminate the problems that may occur from the impersonators of famous people and brands. How? Verification of Twitter accounts will be done and an unique seal of verification will be displayed on those verified accounts. In this was, no one can impersonate you or your company on Twitter.

Yes, there are many fake Twitter accounts that poses as someone else and use the power of this social messaging service for different purposes. You may be a victim, specially when you are famous. With it’s increasing popularity, Twitter is getting more and more impersonation complaints. Recently, Tony La Russa, the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, filed a lawsuit against Twitter claiming that someone else is impersonating him on the service. To clear the news about settlement of the lawsuit, Twitter on Saturday said on their blog that they are not settling the case with La Russa, as appropriate action was already taken from their side.

In normal case, after receiving genuine complaints, Twitter either suspend, delete, or transfer control of accounts. But that kind of solutions are not probably working out nicely. That’s why Twitter though about something else and on Saturday announced the ‘Verified Accounts’ feature with a sneak peak on their official blog. The new feature will provide a ‘Verified Account’ seal to Twitter accounts after verification. Take a look at the screenshot above. Though there is no information about how the verification will be done, there is a hint that link to Twitter account from official site may be considered as proof of genuine user.

Initially the ‘Verified Accounts’ feature will be rolled out as beta. This summer, the beta will cover a small group of public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other well known individuals at risk of impersonation. In my view this is a good step towards making this incredible social messaging and microblogging service friendlier and more enjoyable. What you say? Goodbye Twitter impersonators!

URL shorteners are now an important part of blogging. They not only shrinks your long URLs, but also helps when you want to hide your affiliate links. Still looking for the shortest URL shortener? Your wait is finally over as the shortest URL shortener in the World arrives in the form of Threely - 3.ly. Yes, 3.ly is the name of a URL shortener and with this new service you can get incredibly short, 14 characters long URLs.

So, with Threely you can get incredibly short URLs. Just 14 characters long URLs means now you can use some more characters on character-limited services such as Twitter. But wait! Threely is a new service and surprisingly it lacks advanced features. Yes, you can add a custom identifier while converting your link, but in my view that is not enough. Because the market of URL shortener is already near saturation with so many services with so many options.

The creators of Threely probably know that fact and that’s why they have added a notice on their site stating that other advanced options such as click-tracking will be added soon. So, stay tuned for future updates and in the mean time don’t forget to use Threely to shrink your long and ugly URLs into short and slim ones!

Visit: http://3.ly

Using Twitter for social networking? Want to interact and network with the top business executives on Twitter? Here comes a new site that may help you. The site is called ExecTweets and is basically a Twitter resource site that tracks and lists top business executives that are using Twitter.

ExecTweets was created by Federated Media in partnership with Microsoft. It not only tracks and lists the executives on Twitter but also publishes all meaningful or interesting business-related tweets. Many top business executives of top companies are now using Twitter. On ExecTweets they are listed according to the industry. For example, Government, Health care, Media, Retail, Technology etc. So, go to the industry section of your choice, find the right people and follow them on Twitter.

ExecTweets

So, what you can do with ExecTweets? First of all, this is all about business. Don’t use it as a tool to find and follow business executives just for spamming purposes. Instead use it as a tool to get inspirations and tips from executives. If you are also a business executive or a business owner, finding the right people to follow and interact on Twitter will become a lot easier with the help of ExecTweets. And if you want the tweets only, stay on the front page and read who is tweeting what. Also you can suggest your favorite business executives if they are not already listed there.

Visit: ExecTweets

Lately popular micro-blogging platform Twitter has been hit by phishing scams! If you are getting a Twitter direct message reading: “check out this funny blog about you”, don’t click the link. Because it will redirect you to a fake Twitter login page on http://twitter.access-logins.com/login/, created by some phishers. If someone enters Twitter username and password on that site, their accounts could be hijacked by those phishers for sending direct spam messages on behalf of you. So, never enter your login details on unknown sites. At least give a look at the URL before entering your username and password.

On Saturday, Twitter quickly informed it’s users about the phishing attack through a status update:

If you receive an email notice saying you’ve received a Direct Message with a link that redirects to what seems like Twitter.com, be careful about entering your Twitter credentials. Instead, look closely at the URL to see if it’s not really Twitter but a sketchy phishing site like http://twitter.access-logins.com. If this has you feeling a bit weirded out, feel free to change your Twitter password.

After looking at the WHOIS report of that particular site, you can easily tell that the registrant is in China. But the good thing is that that fake site is now being blocked by all major web browsers except Internet Explorer. So, Firefox users don’t have to worry about it.

I wanted to see how the phishing site looks or how they are trying to make us fool! So, I opened that site on Internet Explorer and found that it is a den of phishing attacks. The main URL (http://twitter.access-logins.com) displays a fake Facebook login page (second screenshot), which takes the user to a URL similar to Facebook.com. It means that they are also trying to attack the Facebook users? But, one can easily stay away from that one by looking at the URL which includes the word ‘twitter’.

So, the bottomline is Internet is full of scams and frauds. If you want to stay away from them, never click suspicious links and never enter your login details on unknown sites.

Want to find out who is talking about your topic of interest on Twitter lately? Want to discover the hot topics on Twitter? Then I think you should give Tweetag, a new Twitter-based service, a try. This Belgium based service that will enable you to browse the public tweets through tags. Tagging and Twitter? How it is done? Tweetag uses a automatic tagging system, which analyzes and tags more than 200K tweets every day. These tags helps them to generate nested tag clouds so that you can easily browse through the sea of endless tweets.

On their home page, Tweetag sorts out and displays the 40 most frequent topics being discussed on Twitter. The size of each tag varies with it’s relative importance. A tag about which more people are talking about, appears big compared to a less talked about one.

You can also search with your own tags to find out who is talking about what lately! You can also use multiple tags to refine your search. You can add tags to the selection by clicking on them. A click on a tag in the “selected tags” bar will remove it from the selection.

For example, want to check tweets on Google voice search on iPhone? Just use Googe and iPhone as tags and start your search. The results are presented in four tabs - all, links, questions and replies. So, if you want to check the links posted on Twitter, related to your topic, just select the “links” tab.

Tweetag has a developer API which one can use to build cool apps and widgets based on their data. Well, this is just a beginning for Tweetag. In near future more features such as thematic tag clouds are expected to be added to the Twitter-based service. Before that, why don’t you give it a try?

Want to earn some money from your Twitter account? Take a look at a startup called ‘Be a Magpie‘, which pays twitterers for posting ad tweets (they call it magpie-tweets) in between their normal tweets. The magpie-tweets are published by them and all you have to do is give them your password. So, unlike TwittAd, which uses Twitter backgrounds for advertisement, ‘Be a Magpie’ directly advertises through tweets. I’m sure that you will check it!

How actually ‘Be a Magpie’ works? It allows advertisers to create ad campaigns with a message and some keywords. Then, the system publishes those ads in between regular tweets and you get paid for it! They publishes tweets, on behalf of you, that matches with the topics you are twittering about. How often they publishes the ad tweets or magpie-tweets? Well, it depends on your own choice. You can choose to have one magpie-tweet per 20 tweets or one magpie-tweet per tweet. The default is one magpie-tweet every five tweets. This is very important, as too many ad tweets may annoy your followers.

How much you can earn? Your earnings will depend on the total number of followers you have on Twitter. The more popular you are, the more advertisers will compete for a tweet in your timeline and ultimately you will earn more. The value of a magpie-tweet is assessed through automated bidding of the advertisers that compete for advertisements.They will pay you via PayPal, once your accumulated earnings reaches € 50.

So, how to start? Anyone over 18 years of age and a Twitter account can register as a publishers on the Magpie network. Simply enter your Twitter name in their sign-up page and you will get an idea about how much you could earn. If you are interested to go forward, just give them your Twitter password and start earning! Well, in order to get paid, you must have a PayPal account and I’m sure that you have one.