Tweet Later gives Twitter features a shot in the arm

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Twitter’s co-founders have for a while been gabbing about charging premium clients for additional features. But one start-up is already making it happen.

Tweet Later‘s flagship feature is the ability to schedule tweets to post at a set time in the future -- something that traditional blogging software has had for years.

Let’s say you’re on a transcontinental flight for a day or taking a week’s vacation. Instead of a lengthy blackout, you can keep the info flowing by queuing up a series of updates.

A number of its other feature seem to overlap with additions Twitter made to the service in its last redesign. But its auto-follow and -unfollow features can be handy: If you’re follow-happy, it lets you follow everyone who follows you without pesky manual intervention. Likewise, if followers decide not to receive your tweets anymore, the service quickly drops them from your follow list. So there!

The service doesn’t, however, skirt Twitter’s 2,000-a-day subscribe limit that prevents users from going follow-haywire.

With two-thirds of businesses saying they use social media, according to a recent Business Pulse survey, Tweet Later is hoping to profit from offering premium features. For $29.97 per month, users get a dashboard that supports multiple accounts and the grouping of individual users into categories.

Granted, many of those tools can be found in desktop software, like TweetDeck or Tweetie. But Tweet Later integrates them into a single Web interface.

-- Mark Milian