One of the coolest things about Twitter is how it allows you to see, in almost real-time, what huge groups of people are talking about. You can see a map with

One of the coolest things about Twitter is how it allows you to see, in almost real-time, what huge groups of people are talking about. You can see a map with where people are posting on Twitter from: http://twittervision.com/ http://twittervision.com/ You can see a real-time tag cloud showing what topics people are talking about on Twitter: http://www.twitscoop.com http://www.twitscoop.com And of course, you can search Twitter to see what people are saying about something: http://search.twitter.com http://search.twitter.com Case in point: A few weeks ago there was a Yahoo outage on the East-Coast for about 40 minutes. When I first discovered it, I searched Twitter for "Yahoo" and found a dozen people within the past minute complaining Yahoo was down. This quickly confirmed the outage for me. These are just a few examples, but I think you get the idea. I rebelled against Twitter at first, but now I think it's awesome. The turning point for me was actually a Penny Arcade comic (http://tinyurl.com/6gh4lg http://tinyurl.com/6gh4lg) and the follow-up blog post (http://tinyurl.com/5c4zds http://tinyurl.com/5c4zds) that made me realize (http://tinyurl.com/5tj2kk http://tinyurl.com/5tj2kk) I don't use Twitter for what they intended (to answer the question, "What are you doing?"). Twitter is exciting because the number of possible things it can be used for are nearly endless and the ways the data can be used are almost equally as endless. Another awesome usage of Twitter that I've seen recently is the way site admins are using Twitter to leave status updates about the outage. They list their Twitter feed on the "We'll be right back" page, but since it's Twitter, people can choose to "follow" the user and get updates without visiting the site (if they enable "mobile updates", they'll even get notified via SMS). mininova.org is one site I've noticed using Twitter like this.