Facebook Pages are becoming a lot more like Twitter in terms of the ways marketers can use them to reach and engage people inside Facebook. Twitter has proven that the "status update subscription + news feed" conversation model works well for a variety of marketers - from large brands to self promoters like bloggers, consultants, and real estate agents.

The winner of our impromptu contest for best visualization of the Tools of Change (TOC) Conference Twitter activity is Stephen Smith for his Wordle tag clouds and stats over at toctweet.com

"What are you going to get done with just a standalone Twitter? You're going to have a lot of conversations around something -- have conversations about content, collaboration, and people," says Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext. "That's why I think something that is a conversational tool like this really benefits from a direct tie-in to the way you're otherwise working."

Regardless of the anger in the community, which clearly has been discounted as a small minority in Twitter's game plan, the clarity of Twitter's rate limiting and brute force approach in managing its developer community now stand in sharp contrast to FriendFeed's approach.

We've delivered social messaging in a way that delivers an integrated value proposition, which will take us into different use cases than just having a room where people can have conversations," Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield said in an interview.

How to "google" twitter, and get your Twitter search results right on the Google search results page, using a Greasemonkey script.

On a greasemonkey script that brings real-time Twitter search directly into Google search results!

On a greasemonkey script, Nested Twitter Replies, that nests Twitter discussions ~ right in Twitter pages. No need for 3rd-party apps.

Organizations that want benefits from social network tools will need to make some selective, deliberate and thoughtful choices that are different from the most highly restrictive "need to know" policies. For some more high-level thoughts on the relationship between social network and the org chart, see some high level thoughts on that topic, see: http://www.alevin.com/?p=1280

Overall, Twitter is best thought of as a message queuing/routing system built on top of a cache/repository platform.

There's an emerging degree of swarming, coordination, just in time planning, that makes a cohesive group appear to exist out of a series of autonomous individuals. I've personally witnessed people get rides from airports at midnight after the transit stopped, people collectively swarm to try track down a stolen bicycle, venue changes for meetings where nobody misses a beat, random get-togethers facilitated by a real time awareness. There is a kind of real time responsiveness not present with services such as email, the telephone, the classifieds or even newspapers and television mass media.