With the recent ramp-up of high-profile hacks – Mat Honan of Wired, Burger King, Jeep – backing up your online life is more imperative than ever.

There are many valid routes to take in choosing what system to use to back up your digital data.

You could export data piecemeal from each service – download your Twitter archive, your Facebook data, use VaultPress for your blog. You could use a service like Backupify, which provides automated cloud backups of your Facebook, Twitter, Google apps and Flickr account.

Or you could check out SocialSafe, a newly revamped digital library service.

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You probably know that Twitter is a powerful communication tool, but many just don’t really get how to use it. If you want to master Twitter, you need to understand the Tao of Twitter – or the way it works.

So if you’re struggling, you should be thrilled to learn that Mark Schaefer wrote this book just for you (in a cosmic sense).

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Yesterday, most of the tech blogs (and, indeed, Twitter itself) came over all giddy at the release of TweetBot, a new, full-featured Twitter client for the iPhone that many pundits are suggesting is the first legitimate challenge to Twitter’s official app, Twitter for iPhone.

Billed as a ‘Twitter client with personality’, TweetBot is certainly nice to look at, and comes with a number of innovative features, but is it really as good as Twitter’s product?

Short answer: not quite, but assuming that they don’t fall foul of Twitter’s wrath, TweetBot could very well be the client of choice in versions to come.

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Many dedicated TweetDeck Users had tired some time ago of running a bulky, memory-hogging desktop application to control Twitter (and then other social streams) some time ago when web-based options such as Hootsuite became available. The folks at TweetDeck heard their cries, and Wednesday released its own long-awaited Web app. But there’s one thing that still rankles.
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You might be hard-pressed to find a more useless Twitter app than Twimon (in fact, that is a challenge). Twimom combines all the worst aspects of Twitter clients, Tamagatchi eggs and check-in services in one giant buggy ball of inanity. It’s as if someone decided they needed to come up with a way to get kids who aren’t interested in using Twitter at all to start tweeting.
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They say it’s always 5 o’clock somewhere, and with BarBird — a new iPhone app that harnesses the power of Twitter to find specials (happy hour or no) — it’s more true than ever. Once its promise is fulfilled, this app could be a barhopper’s dream.
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There’s a fine line between “I just want you to shut up for one damn minute” and “I’m going to unfollow you.” Or, at least, that’s the premise of a new feature introduced by Handmark for Tweetcaster Thursday, called, appropriately enough, “Zip it.”
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The best thing that can be said about the new official Twitter App for Mac (also known as the artist formerly known as Tweetie) is that it’s simple. The next best thing you can say about is that it’s free.
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A work-at-home dad turns to Twitter to share updates about kids, causes and life. It’s a curated selection of bizarre quotes, funny stories and temper tantrums. Woven between potty-training woes and breakfast time songs is a family growing through adoption and learning how to change the world, one status update at a time.

Written by Kevin Hendricks (@kevinhendricks), Addition By Adoption is a great read – laugh-out-loud funny in parts, whilst touching and moving in others. Certainly if you’re a parent, this will have a lot of appeal.

The concept of sharing your story via tweets is clever and I think will become pretty commonplace in years to come.

Visit Kevin’s site to purchase, or pick up a copy at Amazon. A portion of all sales (or donations) will go toward building a well in Ethiopia.

Twitter for iPhone – aka, Tweetie 3 – was released today. You can download it here (iTunes link). It’s free.

This review will be brief, essentially because Twitter for iPhone isn’t enormously different to Tweetie 2. Sure, they’ve moved a few things around and done a couple of minor adjustments to search, but for the seasoned Tweetie user the overall difference is very marginal indeed.

These include:

• An ability to use the app without actually having a Twitter account. (Which seems both utterly pointless and actually self-destructive from Twitter’s point of view.)
• On the off chance you think that Twitter looks fun, you can now sign up within the app
• Search results have been “improved”, which means you’ll now be able to see ads

So, not much different for veterans. Be warned – if you install Twitter for iPhone, it overwrites Tweetie. It’s one or t’other.

For new users to Tweetie, however, this is an essential download. For the full list of reasons why, check out my review of Tweetie 2. Don’t let my indifference put you off – it was already spectacularly good. I just expected this upgrade to offer a little bit more.