Don't you love it when a plan comes together? In this case our "plan" is to bring you interesting design and development tools and techniques to make you (or your clients) more successful on the Web.

Today, let's look at a few recent jQuery plugins that will help you tap into the overwhelming popularity of... Twitter. 

Tweetlink is a very handy jQuery plugin that enables website visitors to select a button or link (using TweetLink) and when clicked, automatically shortens the URL of the current page using bit.ly, sending the user to Twitter with the status box already filled in. 

JTwitter is a jQuery API plugin that when given a Twitter username retrieves and returns a JavaScript object with user details such as followers & following counts, full name, homepage URL, etc.

Juitter is a jQuery plugin that is being used actively by quite a few developers. The plugin can show a live "tweet" stream, tweets from or to a user, and tweets containing a specific word. Juitter has support for multiple users, and developers have the option of restricting search by language. And of course, it's fully customizable with a stylesheet. Here's a quick screenshot of how Juitter could look on your Web property:

TweetQuote is another jQuery plugin (combining Twitter's open Search API and a few basic AJAX calls) that pulls the latest Twitter tweets based on search terms for display on a website. Simply change the load parameter to a desired phrase and you're off and running. Users can even add advanced options (everything from refresh rates to animation speeds and language requests) and the styling of their choice. Here's a sample screenshot of the default TweetQuote install using the Tweet search for "Obama":