Citizen Journalism

I knew about the plane crash on the Hudson 30 minutes before CNN & NYtimes posted it on their website because of Twitter and was able to discover more using their search feature. There's more value than people give credit in this service that increases the ability to share information

Twitter enables search, but does anyone know of a Twitter current events page or application? It seems like there's a continued need to use Twitter to link the little guy to the mainstream. Or maybe Twitter will start making money by selling friends.

Twitter Tools

I just got back from another technology, branding and innovation summit - exciting times, I know. Most interesting was to hear how interactive experiences are becoming the predominant medium for brand communication. Twitter was at the top of the discussion so I thought I would expand.

The list of Twitter tools and applications is diversifying. It's great because they make Twitter an even more interesting and relevant medium. The people who Twitter provide great insights, interesting links, breaking news, creative perspectives and a slew of other interesting information. The problem is that it's hard to sort through it. Here are a few tools that I found at PR 2.0 that make Twitter more useful.

TwitterLocal is the ideal service for quickly finding active voices within a specific city, state, postal code as well as the vicinity, ranging from 1 mile to 20.

Twinkle is a location-aware network for the iPhone and iPod Touch that helps you discover, connect, and send messages to the public timeline and also to people nearby.

Twubble can help expand your Twitter network. It searches your friend graph and introduces and recommends new people who you may want to follow.

GroupTweet allows anyone who wants to broadcast and share private tweets to a specific group can do so for free using this unique and helpful service.

Twitt(url)y is a service for tracking popular URLs people are sharing on Twitter as a way to identify trends, topics, and new and interesting tools and services. It's basically Techmeme or Google News for Twitter, but for all popular links shared in a given day.

TwitLinks aggregates the latest links from the worlds top tech twitter users.

Gridjit is a social portal that lets you view your web universe in a more visually rich way. It becomes your hub for tracking conversations, interesting people and those they @ frequently, and also provides a central location to post and share.

Twist analyzes and presents trend comparisons and volume between keywords and tags.

Whoshouldifollow.com makes it easy to find relevant, like-minded friends as well as friends of friends based on keyword and validated networks.

Tweet Scan, like Summize (Twitter Search), is a search engine for Twitter. Both services provide the ability to search keywords, company/product/competitors names, users, etc. The services also feature the hottest search trends at that particular moment.

Twitpic provides a bridge from your camera phone to Twitter.