One of Twitters Useful Applications - January 8, 2009

In case your leg has been trapped underneath a boulder keeping you isolated in the middle of the woods for the past couple years, you might not know about this whole Twitter thing. As always, I must state that I'm not an avid user of Twitter, I do, however, find a few things that I can do to put it to use.

Using Twitter Search, one can make a query to find all the most recent tweets about something. I've been using this for quite sometime, before it was actually Twitter Search (formally Summize). Beyond doing silly queries like, "dancing hotdog" or "web 2.0," one can do queries to find real-time news updates (hell...CNN even has their own Twitter feed). I recently used Twitter to find out information about last night's riots in Oakland. Below is what I got:

Pretty decent information, but it could be better. Moral of this post: There are new ways to gain instant original information about real-time events from the point of a view of bystanders, witnesses, etc.