If I’ve been a hermit lately, it’s because I’ve been hard at work in the Twitter world. Apologies to my family for not calling as often.

I’ve been busy during the day doing some fun work on a variety of things. Between the hours of midnight and 5am, though, I’ve put together a few fun new Twitter tools. The first was inspired when I spoke at the first Twitter conference back in May. I got followed by a lot of interesting people, but some of them got lost in the random follows I get as well.

So I built FollowBack y’all - a simple little tool to follow back people that recently followed you, based on their tweets. Once you log in, you’re presented with a list of recent followers you’re not following and a search box. Entering a term in the search box searches tweets and tries to match up new followers that mentioned that term. Then you can follow back with one click of a button.

The other couple tools are based off something I built that could be useful for Twitter developers - programmatic access to Twitter avatars based off a username or user id, something Twitter doesn’t provide at the moment.

The first is called Commonality - a tool to show you what friends and followers you have in common with somebody else on Twitter. Seeing as how it was built in about an hour, the interface is certainly lacking but here’s an example that shows the common friends and followers I have with @securitytwits.

The second is called FollowMinder - a tool to remind you when you followed somebody on Twitter. Again, more of a demonstration of the TwitterAvatar tool, but interesting to remind myself when or why I followed somebody. As an example, @wardspan was the second person I followed among a few good friends.

Finally, I was curious one night who I’ve blocked on Twitter and the API had just been updated with new “block” methods. A little while later and I had put up TwitBlocked - a tool see who you’ve blocked on Twitter.

I hope you enjoy!