How To: Integrate Twitter into Your WordPress Blog

Although I personally am not a major Twitter user, I do see the value in the service and have made several attempts to use it more often.   For many others, it has become an addiction and possibly even a major time sink.

One trend we are starting to see more often lately is Twitter being integrated into WordPress blogs.  In the past we’ve featured a couple methods to integrate Twitter into your blog such as How to Add a “Tweet This” Link To Your Blog and How to Display Most Recent Twitter Entry.   Even more recently there have been some WordPress plugins released to further integrate Twitter into your WordPress blog:

1. Tweetbacks - This recent plugin by our friend Joost De Valk displays any “tweets” about your blog post below that post in the same way trackbacks/pingbacks are often displayed on WordPress blogs.   You can read more information about the plugin and how to install it here.  A similar plugin called TweetSuite was released recently as well.
2. Twitter Comments - Works similar to Gravatars, but displays the comment author’s Twitter avatar instead.  If a Twitter avatar is not available, it will then attempt to locate a Gravatar to use instead.

Due to the popularity of WordPress, I would imagine this is only the tip of the iceberg and many more Twitter WordPress plugins will follow over the coming months/years.   Out of curiosity, for those of you that are heavy Twitter users, what have you done to integrate Twitter into your WordPress blog?

Update: I just ran across this post over at Profit Blogger which shares more than 20 Twitter WordPress plugins that already exist.