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Ok, so what is Twitter and why should you care?  First, let's start with what it isn't.  Twitter is *not* about micro-blogging.  Yes, it is described this way - yes even by it's founders.  But they have also admittedly publicly that much of the innovation on Twitter has happened in the user base - the convention for retweets (RT), for example, came from the user base.  For those of you who are new, RT is just a way to a convention for sharing a message from someone you follow to your own followers.  It's sort of citation plus recommendation plus message all wrapped in a little two letter acronym.

Top ways to Tweet!

"That was a really handy and timely hack - thanks Martin…:-) PS Makes me wonder if a real time translated backchannel stream might be a handy value add for international confs? After all, it's pointless more than one person in a conf doing the tweet translation if the result itself can be streamed?"

Aggregate all your stats in one place ...

Excellent article about the research from several researchers about Tweets that are compelling and those that are turn-offs. This and the original research are both great reads. I thought it funny that people particularly hate foursquare check ins mentioned through Twitter, so unlink that account or lose followers! "One piece of advice: Nix the "sandwich tweets." People do not care what you are eating for lunch. (Specifically: "Sorry, but I don't care what people are eating," "too much personal info," "He moans about this ALL THE TIME. Seriously.") Twitter, as a communications platform, has evolved beyond nascent Twttr's charmingly mundane updates ("cleaning my apartment"; "hungry") and into something more crowd-conscious and curatorial. Though Twitter won't necessarily replace traditional news, it increasingly functions as a real-time newswire, disseminating and amplifying information gathered from the world and the web.

BlastFollow enables you to follow Twitter users who share your interests en masse. This web site is a production of Triangle Information Solutions. To use BlastFollow, simply enter a favorite hashtag (for example, "americanidol") in the box below. Then, click the "Get Users!" button. After a few seconds, you will see the number of users who tweeted with that hashtag recently. Then, you need only enter your Twitter name and password and click "Blast!" You will start following all of those users. You can usually see the progress on a user-by-user basis.

BlastFollow enables you to follow Twitter users who share your interests en masse. This web site is a production of Triangle Information Solutions. To use BlastFollow, simply enter a favorite hashtag (for example, "americanidol") in the box below. Then, click the "Get Users!" button. After a few seconds, you will see the number of users who tweeted with that hashtag recently. Then, you need only enter your Twitter name and password and click "Blast!" You will start following all of those users. You can usually see the progress on a user-by-user basis.

Ask a question of your Twitter followers and easily gather all their answers in one spot.

An all-in-one networking software.

Information overload is so five years ago, but the problem it describes is all too real. Fortunately, there's hope yet for the savvy librarian: Twitter and FriendFeed turn information dissemination on its head, using friends and subscribers as a filter for the best, most credible, and most engaging information out there. As Clay Shirky said at the Web 2.0 Expo keynote in January, the problem isn't "information overload. It's filter failure."

To the Internet hipsters who discovered Twitter in 2006, Oprah's inaugural tweet - FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY, she typed - was the end of the era, the shark jump. But that's like saying the Beatles were over after they appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show." Twittermania has only begun. In the days after Oprah's show, Twitter's traffic growth is accelerating. The ratings service HitWise now ranks twitter.com as America's No. 38 Web site. It's about to rocket past CNN and Wells Fargo.

This is a great article about twitter. And I really like the idea that it is a LOT about what we can DO with twitter data that makes it so compelling (all those great apps out there). "Websites that once saw their traffic dominated by Google search queries are seeing a growing number of new visitors coming from "passed links" at social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it's just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit. Put those three elements together - social networks, live searching and link-sharing - and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google's near monopoly in searching."

This is a mesmorizing way to watch the Twitter public feed. All new Tweets are shown in real-time and twitscan captures all of the latest URLs and posts them on the right of the page.

Watch Twitter posts in real-time.

Great ideas for how to find people on Twitter.