I pretty much live in Outlook. E-mail at the Commission runs on the state’s Exchange server and my use of Outlook allows me to sync my office and home PCs’ tasks and calendar via my Windows Mobile-running cell phone. Love it or hate it, I live in Outlook. So, when I heard about TwInbox, “the Twitter add-in for Microsoft Outlook” I was intrigued. A quick download and install and I had a new Twitter bar in my copy of Outlook.

Overall, the program is easy to setup and use. Just go into the options and supply your Twitter login information. (You’ll also want to choose a new folder for all your tweets in else they all end up in your Inbox.)

After a checking for new posts, all of your tweets will arrive as if they were individual e-mail messages. Posting and replying can be done via the Twitter bar at the top of Outlook.

Just like e-mail individual tweets can be opened, forwarded, filtered, searched, filed and printed.

Most interestingly, the program can also analyze all of your tweets and give you back some interesting statistics.

Overall it’s an interesting program. (Obviously I’ve not covered everything it can do.) But even with the way I work I don’t see the point. Tweets aren’t e-mail and to treat them as such sort of defeats the purpose. If I wanted to e-mail someone I’d send e-mail. Twitter just isn’t supposed to work this way. However, if your location blocks twitter.com I suppose this might be a suitable workaround.

Set up a Twitter account for your PC then install TweetMyPC on your Windows-based computer. Now, just send a tweet to that account you created and you can shutdown, restart or log off your PC via twitter.

A few notes from my experience in testing this:

• Do not use your regular twitter account. Set you a separate account just for this or it won’t work.
• TweetMyPC checks for new tweets once a minute. Because of this do not set it up then immediately leave your PC. Leave it running for a few minutes to make sure no errors are reported once you start it the first time. I did just that and came back a hour latter to 60+ errors on my screen that I had to clear.