True to its namesake, Monitter allows you to input a couple of keywords and track what the twitter community is saying. It’s a browser-based tool, and all you need to do is to open it in a new tab, put in your keywords and the tweets will stream past continously. Some things I like about it: you can chose to receive tweets from a specific location, for example 10km of Manhatten. Or you can track tweets only in a specific language (French, English, Spanish and German).

Dave Poulson talked about the use of Twitter during an internet broadcast of US Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s annual state of the state speech. The Twitter discussion online was accompanied by a hashtag established by the governor’s staff, thereby allowing other users to use the hashtag to discuss specific points. He offers some suggestions on how journalists and media can regulate Twitter discussions:

Perhaps the journalist’s role in this kind of activity is to simply help establish and publicize the hashtag. In this case, that wasn’t necessary because of the governor’s Twitter-savvy staff. But that won’t always be the case. And journalists (like any other Twitter user) can still play a role in publicizing the relevant hashtags in play.

Update: It’s confirmed. The Dalai Lama Twitter account was a fake and imposter. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone reveals this in an email to the Associated Press.

Just a little more than a day after getting on Twitter, the Dalai Lama’s profile has been suspended for ‘due to strange activity’. This could mean several things:

1. It was a fake account, set up by an imposter with no ties to His Holiness’s office.
2. Twitter’s automated spam algorithm kicked in and automatically suspended it due to massive follow activity.
3. A random glitch in the Twitter system.

David Braue at ZD Net Australia talks about how Twitter is a threat to telcos, specfically because it may damage their ability to sell SMS (paid cell-to-cell text msgs). Think about it this way, if Skype and internet VoIP reduced and in some cases even eliminated, the demand to make phone calls with paid lines, Twitter may do the same to the medium of SMS.

I think its a decent argument which ties into the bigger spectrum of how communication is being globalized with reduced costs, primarily through the increased popularity of the mobile web.

Friendbar is a Firefox toolbar addon that displays a stream of text and photo updates from your Twitter and Facebook friends. After installing it and logging in, you’ll only see your Twitter friend updates but you can reply or retweet them using the toolbar. It also helps to create a tiny URL for the webpage you are viewing, if you’re interested in sending out some tweets.

It operates like a news ticker, displaying updates constantly. However, instead of slow scrolling motion, updates are changed through a fast swooshing motion, which can be very distracting when you have a lot of friends or people who update rapidly. A different choice of update change animations would be great.

Update: Turns out this was an imposter. The Dalai Lama is not on Twitter. The fake account has been suspended and removed.

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama has started a twitter account 19 hours ago… but its not really him tweeting. It’s an official account administered by his office in order to communicate with the public. It appears to be actively interacting with people who talk to it… a healthy number of @replies are always good. Right now, there are 25 updates and 8000 followers, the account is also following 2000 other users. Cool.

Alley Insider recently held a contest to create Twitter’s Revenue Model, with the aim of helping Twitter find a revenue system and actually start making money. The contest was well received and the winner was announced, an ad agency. Here’s the winning group’s slide presentation:

Twitter Contest-Denuology Entry94 Update

Basically, their plan is to sell data and charge for access to users who can opt-in to do surveys and give feedback to companies. There are some reasons why it might not work as well as planned:

Twestival is a series of community gatherings featuring Twitter users worldwide on the 12th of February 2009. The goal of this is to bring together Twitter users locally for an evening of fun and also to raise money for charity.

Basically, what you can do is to check out the city sites listed on their mainpage and then participate in the specific event. Or you can donate directly to the charity or spread word of the festival (see the media kit) if you’re not attending.

Taken from the Diesel Sweeties webcomic.

Twisten.fm is a site that crawls through Twitter to discover tweets about music. It then streams them onto the frontpage and includes a ‘play’ button so you can easily click to listen to the song mentioned. Alternatively, you can click on the title of the song (a tinysong link) and it’ll open in Grooveshark, another music streaming service thats run by the guys who did Twisten.

If you already have a Twitter account you should be able to see your profile on Twisten, even if you haven’t shared anything yet. Each profile only collects your music tweets. The service appears to have recently launched and its a good idea although I would love to see more features.