An Atlanta city councilman has used Twitter to save the life of a woman who had a seizure on the street. Instead of calling 911 for medical assistance, Kwanza Hall sent out a twitter message because his phone battery was low and he didn’t want to be stuck on hold.

“Need a paramedic on corner of John Wesley Dobbs and Jackson st. Woman on the ground unconscious. Pls ReTweet,” was the message he sent out on the social networking Web site.

The brevity of Twitter updates makes it an ideal tool to be used to jot down short notes, observations or reminders to yourself. While you can manually record what you eat or spend everyday, your tweets might be difficult to archive in a way which can be viewed with a single glance. That’s where websites like tweetwhatyoueat and tweetwhatyouspend come in. Both of them allow you record what you eat or spend on a daily basis and make it referenceable via an online interface.

Adam Wilson, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison managed to update his twitter account by using his mind only.

How did he do that? By strapping a brain-computer interface (BCI) to his head and connecting it to a computer. The electrodes detected signals caused by his thoughts:

Mr Wilson’s Twitter set-up contains an onscreen alphabet. The letters flash in turn, and when the letter that the user wants to type flashes, the system detects a spike in their brain activity, and selects that letter.

Have too much time on your hands? Maybe you would want to integrate Twitter with a physical object in your environment. It’s not difficult to do as long as you have the right equipment. That’s what someone did when they decided to set up a Twitter account for an office chair and set it so that it tweets when the sitter farts:

The Twittering office chair “tweets” (posts a Twitter update) upon the detection of natural gas such as that produced by human flatulence. This is part of my commitment to accurately document and share my life as it happens.

Arduino is a pretty cool open-source electronic platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software: perfect for hoobyists and designers keen on building interactive environments. Even better when integrated with an alert system like Twitter.

We’ve seen quite a few implementations of Arduino and here’s one which integrated with with Twitter. A Twitter burgler alarm that notifies you when someone enters your house.

A burglar alarm that tweets when an intruder enters the house? What with the fashion for Twitter lately, I thought I’d give it a go, and this also gave me the excuse I’d been looking for to try out the Arduino hardware platform.

CNN reports that surgeons are using twitter in the the operating room. They’re posting real-time tweet updates about specific procedures for the curious, doctors and other medical students. Cool stuff. Is there any sort of real-world operation that cannot be transported onto text on Twitter?

Whether it’s new and cool or merely yicky, observers say there’s no question that more and more doctors — and patients — will be sharing the blow-by-blow of medical procedures on sites like Twitter and Facebook.

While Twitter users span a large demographic, a good amount of them fall within a similar pattern: young adults. According to research from Pew Internet, the biggest Twitter user group are adults from 25 to 34 with many of them being mobile savvy.

Nearly one in five (19%) online adults ages 18 and 24 have ever used Twitter and its ilk, as have 20% of online adults 25 to 34. Use of these services drops off steadily after age 35 with 10% of 35 to 44 year olds and 5% of 45 to 54 year olds using Twitter. The decline is even more stark among older internet users; 4% of 55-64 year olds and 2% of those 65 and older use Twitter.

Here’s another cool use of Twitter. Orbiting Frog has created several Twitter feeds that use data to determine when the International Space Station (ISS) and Hubble will be visible over your part of the sky. When the time approaches for them to move over your city, you will get a 30 – 45 minutes tweet beforehand so you can go out and check it out. Tweet alerts will also only show up when the weather is good enough.

We know all the value of Twitter when seeking recommendations for specific products or feedback. It’s invaluable to get comments from people of all walks of life, especially when its all arriving in real time. It’s very useful when you’re unfamiliar with what you’re talking about and need more personal info from people you trust. The cool thing is that your Twitter posse is a virtual collection of friends that are accessible anytime, anyplace.. as long as you have an internet/mobile connection.

Here is a fascinating use of Twitter. David Griner discovered a diary by his great-aunt from 1937-1941 and decided to create a Twitter account (@Genny_Spencer) to post the daily diary entries. It’s cool to see the new protocol that is Twitter being used as a method to archive pre-Internet era information. Would be great to see more people pursuing something similar.