Everybody uses instant messaging in some form or other. Whether it be via a web-based app like Facebook, Twitter or Gtalk, or with a standalone application like Trillian, Skype or Miranda IM – Everybody has a favorite. A question was recently posted on Answers asking what is there favorite IM client… so what is your favorite and why?

You can leave your answer in the comment section below, or you can leave your answer on the original question on Answers here: What is your instant messaging client of choice?

This question was originally asked by David Baker.

Here are the best answers so far:
From Csgs:

From Neil Monroe:

So, what is is your instant messaging client of choice?

Thanks to everyone who asked a question, but most importantly thanks to everyone that took the time and effort to offer helpful and useful answers.

When you develop a website that you want to nurse well into its successful stages you can’t help but to wonder “how well your web site’s evolving”. Is it reaching a new peak every month? How many more visitors are arriving on a weekly basis? Is there any actual growth on all aspects? These are just a few of the questions asked by most individuals who build and develop their own websites.

We may not have a direct answer to your questions, but we definitely have a few tools and resources that can. Take a look at the following useful tools which allow you to measure how well your website is managing to evolve not only within your industry, but in growth and popularity as well. Some you may know, but have never used, while some you will have been acquainted with before. It’s vital that you test a few of these tools out to find the ones that work best for you.

Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo! Site Explorer arrives at your “doorstep” with the goal of providing you with better visibility into how they index your websites and what data they use in their search service. You’ll be able to see inlinks from certain URL’s, find backlinks from various websites and more. Backlinks from great sites are essential to give your site a vote of confidence in the eyes of search engines. While there is a whole industry out there that will supply you with links, their value is questionable because they are generally not from quality sites. It is much better to invest properly and either get your own posts (containing a link to your site of course) put on other websites, or ask someone like Publishers Network to do it for you.

Alexa

Alexa has built an unparalleled database of information about sites that includes statistics, related links and more. All of this information can be found on Alexa’s Site Overview pages, Traffic Detail pages and Related Links pages. To access these pages, simply type the URL of any site into the Alexa Search box.

Buzzlogic

Buzzlogic is a pretty nifty tool that’s geared toward the marketing crowd. We had to include this tool because most individuals who want a successful website are also speaking on monetary terms (i.e. Google Adwords, Static Advertisements, etc..). This tool allows you to build a powerful marketing structure that will mend user and site owner relationships.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is an easy way for you to monitor how well your websites performing within the social media circles. This integrated browser client can show you every time a specific target phrase has been mentioned, it also offers a way to connect with your Facebook/LinkedIn/MySpace profile for a more unified way to monitor the conent you’d like.

Compete

Compete is a new breed of web analytics company. It combines site and search analytics in one site to help you quickly master online marketing. With Compete, you can identify rival search marketing strategies to take your SEM and SEO efforts to the next level, and stay on top of rivals with site metrics and audience profiles.

Search Status

SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for Firefox and SeaMonkey that allows you to see how any and every website in the world is performing. Designed for the highly specialized needs of search engine marketers, this toolbar provides extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar.

Socialmention

Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.

Addictomatic

Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on.

Feed Compare

Feed Compare allows you to quickly and easily compare your RSS feed(s) with 3 other sites at a time. This will let you measure how well your feed subscriptions are doing when compared with other websites within your similar niche. This is a great way to keep up with the average amount of subscribers your website is supposed to be receiving within a certain period of time.

There are a variety of ways designers can distribute their designs, however, with the flame social media has ran with, the way we promote our work has to evolve as well. Below we’re going to show you numerous applications that will allow you to promote your artwork through Twitter. The core functionality of these applications is to share images, however, you can use them in order to tweet your work and help gain exposure.

Which apps your favorite?

Img.ly

Img.ly lets you easily share your images through to anyone through Twitter. Just login to your Twitter account on their website and being to upload your images.

TwitPic

TwitPic lets you share photos on Twitter. You can post pictures to TwitPic from your phone, TwitPic’s API, or through the site itself. There are also popular twitter clients that have built-in support for TwitPic.

TweetPhoto

TweetPhoto is a real-time media sharing platform for the social web. TweetPhoto allows users to instantly share their media, at the same time, to popular social networks through mobile devices and on the web.

Twitr Pix

TwitrPix gives you, your friends, family and co-workers the ability to share photos on Twitter by mobile phone, email and the web.

SmugMug

SmugMug is a simple online application that allows you to share your images and photos on Twitter and other social media venues. Once you login simply choose which images you’d like to share and select to share on Twitter.

Flick to Twitt

flick.to.twitt is a service that lets you post a photo to your Flickr account and automatically announce it on your Twitter account.

TwitC

Use TwitC to organize, search, view, comment, share, embed, batch download, collect, favorite, rate uploads, view timelines and profiles, post links to or embed files, and send updates to your profile on Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and other networks.

slect.ly

Slect.ly is a great brand spanking new service that lets you quickly upload and share your images on Twitter. It just recently launched and it comes with a few awesome features. Be one of the first to sign-up!

FolExt

FolExt lets you share photos on Twitter. You can post pictures to FolExt from your phone, our API, or through the site itself. There are also popular twitter clients that have built-in support for FolExt.

Picktor

Picktor is a social picture management service & community that enables users to manage their photos, share their photos, and interact with their online communities.

rosa.ly

Rosa.ly lets you easily share any image found on the web through Twitter. You can even install a Firefox Add-on to take better advantage of this simple and secure application.

twtgal

With twtfal all you have to do is upload your pictures, get short url for the gallery, tweet it! Your first tweet with gallery url will be imported and shown on the gallery page. Last 20 tweets about your gallery will be shown below the images. You can set the style of the gallery and few other options.

Twittergram

Send your Flickr pix to Twitter and show people what you’re up to. To disable posting simply enter your flickr username, select the disable checkbox below it and click Submit.

ShoZu

ShoZu lets you post directly to Twitter and you’ll be able to see your replies. You can also change your Facebook status every time you tweet an image and work with your friends on Flickr.

Pikchur

Pikchur is a simple service that updates your social networks / micro-blogging platforms with pictures & videos (Motion Pikchurs)! No need to signup, just upload your images and start distributing them through Twitter!

Virl

Virl is small and contagious. Share Your Photos, Shorten URLs & Spread the News. Use Virl for Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious or Blogs & Websites Everywhere!

TwitPickr

TwitPickr does not help you update your Twitter status with images, but it allows you to upload your images to TwitPic and then share them on Flickr. All you have to do is enter your Twitter Username and choose the images you’d like to share.

twic.li

Twicli is an way to share your photo and video content on Twitter.

Mobypicture

Directly share your photos, text, audio and videos with all your friends on your favorite social sites: facebook, twitter, flickr, vimeo, and more!

ow.ly

Ow.ly is a pretty clever application that lets you sign in with your Twitter account, then upload a variety of supported files such as .jpg, .gif, .png, .pdf, and .mp3. You’ll be able to easily share them on Twitter once they’ve been uploaded.

Twitsnaps

Share your pictures and videos on Twitter. Log in using your Twitter username and password, or simply sign in with Twitter.You can upload photos directly from our website, or send it as an email attachment.

TwitLens

TwitLens is a premier photo & video sharing service for Twitter. Sign in with Twitter, select the images or videos you’d like to share, and then send them off to Twitter!

Tweet Reel

Tweet Reel lets you shoot pictures and video on your iPhone, upload them to TweetReel.com, and share them on Twitter!

Tweet Mojo

Tweetmojo allows you to share your videos, photos, and documents on Twitter easily. You can also add more mojo by recording from your webcam and adding more text to your tweets!

Brizzly

Brizzly is a reader that works with Twitter and Facebook. It simplifies your browsing and updating experience, while adding a few nifty extras.

There are an abundance of free tools available for every conceivable job, the only problem is you can never find the perfect one! To help you find that exact tool we have compiled a list of resources offering all of your web app solutions – as the saying goes, “we have an app for that”!

20 Fantastic Usability & Conversion Analysis Tools

Usability and conversion analysis tools, such as the examples listed in this article, will help you design or redesign your site to make it easier and enjoyable for visitors to navigate around. Such tools can be expensive, but they needn’t be. Amongst the pricier ones listed you’ll find many that are cheap or completely free to use.

20 Fantastic Usability & Conversion Analysis Tools

20 Great Project Management Tools

Project Management is often defined as the science of organizing, planning and managing the available resources of a particular organization to successfully complete a project, which aims to meet the organization’s goals and objectives.

This type of system will be useful in ensuring the timely and effective output of a project. Furthermore, the implementation of such a system will give you greater productivity in every project.

20 Great Project Management Tools

30 Twitter Tools to Help Grow Your Community

With Twitter, professionals are able to avidly share, distribute, and promote information with the people who are following them. After all, finding an effective way to spread content throughout the web is becoming scarce these days.

However, setting up a Twitter account and posting a tweet isn’t the end of the line. You need to know how to grow and manage a community of followers that will not only will be interested in what you have to say, but they will also want to share with others the things you tweet. This is the idea behind a solid community.

We can take this into account, and apply the same concepts to the success of our Twitter communities.

30 Twitter Tools to Help Grow Your Community

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

Twitter Lists are a recently released Twitter feature. They are an easy way to categorize and organize the people that you follow on Twitter.
In todays news we have useful articles to help you better understand, how to use and what you can do with your Twitter Lists.

HOW TO: Use Twitter Lists

Twitter Lists are Twitter’s long awaited “groups” feature. They offer a way for you to bunch together other users on Twitter into groups so that you can get an overview of what they’re up to.

HOW TO: Use Twitter Lists

10 Ways You Can Use Twitter Lists

Savvy individuals are looking for ways to use lists to further their personal/professional agendas, and while we are all still learning how to harness the power of this new feature, here are a few ideas to get the creative juices flowing.

10 Ways You Can Use Twitter Lists

Listorious: Discover the Best Twitter Lists

Listorious is a simple to use and very useful new web service for discovering the best Twitter lists. Simply, select a tag and you will be presented with the relevant lists.

Listorious: Discover the Best Twitter Lists

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

In todays news we have a great article about how to take your Twitter profile to the next level, with “62 Ways to use Twitter for Business”, we also have PC Mags annual Top 100 Web Sites and lastly we have some really cool and funky artistic chairs.

62 Ways to Use Twitter for Business

Twitter is not only a simple messaging service it can be used for various reasons, of course, some people publicize their daily activities, some make it about link love, some share resources. The people in the know are using for business. In this article the author has listed 62 ways to use Twitter more effectively in your business. Worth a read.

62 Ways to Use Twitter for Business

The Top 100 Web Sites of 2009

Its that time of year again, the release of PC Mags Top 100 Web Sites. It was definitely the year of the web app or service, with hundreds being launching (especially involving Twitter) every month. Have a look for yourself, you may not agree with the verdict, but it still a very good compilation.

The Top 100 Web Sites of 2009

50+ Sleek, Funky and Weird Chair Designs

A chair is no longer just a chair, it is a declaration of style and an art statement. In this post from WebDesigner Depot, they take a look at chair design from an artistic point view. Some of these chairs are amazing.

50+ Sleek, Funky and Weird Chair Designs

The internet is continually growing, but how big is it really? And what about Twitter, is it as popular or as big as we think? These are a two questions being asked in todays news, oh, we also have 40 free iconsets.

40 Free and Useful GUI Icon Sets for Web Designers

The demand for free GUI icons is always great, so when a post as good as this comes along you have to bookmark it and share it. The post contains quite a few new iconsets, all are well designed, and, as the title says, useful.

40 Free and Useful GUI Icon Sets for Web Designers

How big is the internet?

There are 1.46 billion internet users, Microsoft’s Bing has put the number of web pages at over 1 trillion and Google has indexed more than one trillion web addresses. What does this mean? Well. if you spent just one minute reading every website in existence, you’d be kept busy for 31,000 years, with no sleep. No, the internet is not big, it is enormous. If you know how to visualize one trillion, thats how big it is. Well, close enough anyway.

How big is the internet?

If the Twitter community was 100 people…

This is an interesting visual map of how active Twitter users actually are. One of the most interesting facts of this map was that 20% of all accounts are dead, and only 5% of users have over 100 followers. Maybe Twitter isn’t as big or as popular as we like to think. I still love it, all the same.

If the Twitter community was 100 people…

The popular design community site DesignBump, has undergone a major facelift, read about how the site was redeveloped. Also, we have the most overblown guide to Twitter, 20 pages and using 5382 words, all for a service that limits you to a 140 charcter message!

Behind the Scenes of the DesignBump Redesign

DesignBump has recently had a major overall. The pioneer behind the design was, the multi-talented, Chris Spooner, from blog.spoongraphics.co.uk. In his article he talks about the web development process from sketch to end product. The article gives you a great insight into a professional designers workflow.

Behind the Scenes of the DesignBump Redesign

Government Releases 20-page guide to using Twitter

Can you believe the UK Governement has released a 20 page guide on how to use Twitter? The 5,382-word official “template” translates into 36,215 characters and spaces and would need roughly 259 separate tweets to put the word around Whitehall using Twitter. I am sure I could I could explain Twitter to my Gran in under 100 words!

Government Releases 20-page guide to using Twitter

Twitter is probably the most hyped social network out there, all the mainstream medias are talking about it and a lot of celebrities are using the service. The popularity of the website means that you get to connect with tons of other users, but it also means that you’ll have to stand out to do so. For that, having a great Twitter background is recommended to make a great first impression. Learn how to do this with the following collection of tutorials.

Twitter background guidelines

Technical information regarding the file dimensions for a Twitter background, its positioning and some recommended tools.

How to brand yourself with a Twitter background

Introduction to Twitter branding by Calvin Lee of Mayhem Studios. Good advice on the type of Twitter background to chose, tiled image or not.

How to design the perfect Twitter background

An overview of various types of Twitter background, good read to make the right decision about how you will design your own background.

How to make a Twitter background picture

Step by step tutorial to create your Twitter background image with Photoshop.

Twitter Background using Adobe Illustrator

Video tutorial teaching you how to create your Twitter background using the popular vector drawing software.

Create a Twitter background using PowerPoint

For people with no Photoshop skills, this tutorial will explain you how to create your own Twitter background using PowerPoint. Some templates are provided in the article.

Create a Twitter background with Photoshop

Excellent video tutorial with in-depth explanations on how to create a Twitter background with Photoshop.

How to turn a texture into a seamlessly tiled background

Create your Twitter tiled background by editing a texture image with Photoshop.

Twitter background design how-to and best practices

Perhaps the most complete article about the creation of Twitter backgrounds.

High-quality Twitter backgrounds

A collection of free Twitter backgrounds for the people who are too lazy to create their own background.

Peekr

Peekr is a great website to view the entire background image of any Twitter user, very useful to get inspired by other people’s backgrounds.

Twitterbacks

A Flickr gallery of great Twitter extended backgrounds free to use.

1’000+ background patterns you can use for free

For the lazy ones, this website will offer you more than a thousand free patterns to chose from.

About the author: Mirko Humbert is a freelance designer from Switzerland. He shares his thoughts about his passion on his design blog. To connect with Mirko, you can follow him on Twitter.

You are limited to how far you can modify your Twitter homepage, pretty much changing the background color or image and the color of the links is all you can actually do. So, it is no surprise that the best designed homepages (mainly) come from graphic designers, who with a blank canvas can create something amazing out of nothing.

To truly appreciate these designs make sure your monitor resolution is no less than 1280×768.

drewwilliams27@twitter

boagworld@twitter

stephenfry@twitter

Jonathan360@twitter

FreelanceSw@twitter

cheth@twitter

farrhad@twitter

csstinderbox@twitter

Hicksdesign@twitter

k@twitter

MrTweet@twitter

ComputerArts@twitter

collis@twitter

djuro@twitter

ilovetypography@twitter

cameronolivier@twitter

napwarden@twitter

artoffreelance@twitter

anousone@twitter

chadengle@twitter

votetime@twitter

haleystar@twitter

netdivermag@twitter

natalie@twitter

EllisLab@twitter

Free Twitter Background Resources

Twitter Patterns
MyTweetSpace.com – Free Twitter Backgrounds
TwitterGallery.com
TweetStyle
Twitbacks
Twitter Treats
Twitter Backgrounds – a set on Flickr
26 Awesome Backgrounds for Twitter Fanboys. (and Girls).

Twitter Background Tutorials – Create your own

How to create a Twitter background image (blueleafcreative.wordpress.com).
How To Create A Custom Twitter Background (searchforblogging.com).
Make a Good Impression with a Custom Twitter Background.
How to Create a Twitter Background (ehow.com).
Create a Twitter Background Using Powerpoint (theclosetentrepreneur.com).

By Paul Andrew