I have a terrible time following Twitter. There are lots of people who have interesting Tweets, but I don’t like to hang around and watch the stream all day. I can add list activity to Listimonkey but what seems to me to be the ideal solution is still not available. (The ideal solution is to have Twitter lists available as RSS feeds. TWITTER ARE YOU LISTENING!? ARGH!) Ahem. The fact remains that I worry about missing things.

The Web site Chirrps (http://chirrps.com/) offers one potential solution — a directory of popular tweets. The front page has the latest popular tweets and popular tweets in the news category. But there are many other categories available. I looked at the most popular tweets in tech.

Each listing shows the original tweet, an excerpt from the linked article if appropriate, and the date and time tweeted as well as the number of times the item was retweeted. Looking at popular tweets in general I found some that had been retweeted thousands of times, but it looks like the most popular tech tweets were retweeted more like a couple hundred times.

If the categories are not narrow enough for you, you can also do a search. I did a search for database and while I didn’t get a count, I got lots of results. Results were divided into recently popular, popular in the last 24 hours, and popular in the last 48 hours. The most popular item had been retweeted 43 times.

Interesting site. It’s not a complete solution for me — there are no RSS feeds for the search results, and I’m not sure how much of the twitterverse is being covered — but it’s useful enough to go in my toolbox.