It’s been gaining mainstream buzz this year, but Twitter has finally stepped into the bigtime recently with the Wired article about how Twitter broke the news about the Earthquake. To be clear, “Twitter” the company didn’t break the news, but Twitter users were all tweeting about the earthquake before any major news site had published anything.

Wired said, “Blogs and news sites buzzed the next day about how Twitter had ushered in a new era of communication.”

Most people want to talk about the Twitter business model, and sites like Mashable are all excited about Twitter breaking into the big time, but the article made mention of something in passing that really caught my eye. Towards the end of the article, Wired pointed out how companies like Dell, Jetblue and Whole Foods are using Twitter to communicate with customers. It’s this style of “opt-in” communication that people typically think about when they discuss email marketing. If you’ve ever tried to rent or buy, much less create a useful email list for marketing purposes, you’ve no doubt experienced frustration.

It brings me back to my earlier article about leveraging Twitter to build “communities” and get better feedback from customers - in real time. Products like live chat have created great tools for connecting with customers in real time - but times they are a changin - and now consumers like to wear their brand affinities right on their virtual sleeves (aka: social networks like Myspace and Facebook) and this gives brands a phenomenal opportunity to connect with consumers in a network environment.

So what’s this all mean for the entrepreneur or web business out there, debating about whether or not to use social media to connect with customers and whether it has true value. Debate no more. Social media has gone from being news to making it.

In case it wasn’t apparent from previous posts, Twitter is my favorite social network. Of all social media sites, Facebook and Linkedin included, I would much prefer Twitter and use it far more. Not only has Twitter been one of the more enjoyable of the web 2.0 technologies, it’s spawned some amazingly helpful tools to get more out of the technology.

Here is a collection of the most useful or interesting Twitter tools (that I’ve found.)

Summize - This is actually THE Twitter search engine.

Tweetburner.com - Metrics for your links on Twitter.

Tweetscan - Another Twitter search engine, but a very useful one.

Twellow - It’s a different kind of Twitter search, that’s more focused on finding and classifying people, than just giving you a list of tweets by content.
Twitterific - If you have an iPhone, and use Twitter, you probably already have this app. If you don’t have an iPhone this is a great reason to go get one.

Twhirl - I will caveat this by saying I don’t actually USE Twhirl. I did. I’ve downloaded it a couple of times. I can’t get into using it. It’s a cool app, though.

Twittervision - It’s cool, but totally useless. It’s not a Twitter client, it doesn’t aggregate, it will help you make many minutes of your life disappear. Of course, I visit it at least once a day.

Twitter Netvibes Widget - Netvibes is a type of widgetized feed reader and I like it quite a bit. Each feed is visually encapsulated in it’s widget, making them easy to keep apart and scan easily.

Twitpic - I just learned about this and I’m very excited. It allows you to post pictures to Twitter.

Tweetbeep.com - Like Google Alerts, but for Twitter. MUST USE THIS!

I’m sure there are many missing. Please tell me all the cool stuff I’ve missed in comments.

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