However, there’s one benefit from which the vast majority of people on the web might profit. By saying that I know it’s not a secret anymore, yet I would like to focus on this for right now: Real Time.

We’ve seeen a bunch of desastrous, sad catastrophes happening around the globe since the emerge of twitter. Most recently there’s been the Air France Plane Crash or the Hudson River Landing. What do those two sad events have in common? Besides at both aircrafts had been involved we were able to see of how mighty twitter is when it comes to news effecting the entire planet (or I’d rather say the civilized part of it). This especially counts for the Hudson River Plane landing where the first photo from the (almost) crash site came from twitter. CNN, TV Channels and a plethora of others picked it up and quickly made Janis Krums, the photographer a little web celebrity. The Swine Flu or the recent EU Pools have been another examples of how helpful twitter can become when it comes to what’s going on in the world.

Taking this to the next level means that millions of people are writing about stuff that’s occuring right next to them. Looking back it was a damn smart move from Twitter to buy summize, the now integrated twitter search. However, that’s not it. There is a bunch of other sites out there trying to compete with twitter as a real-time search engine itself. I recently summed up the one’s available based on the twitterwiki for News. From analazing all the one’s available, all140.com seems to deliver the best results. From a design perspective i must say that Flack is doing a really good job, however they are only based on twitter.com

All140.com is based upon twitter as the main source of real-time content. Building onto that it fetches data from twitpic (visual) and Google News (World News).

Another Service that seems to be kicking off lately is Tweetmeme. The basic idea and it’s central element is the so-called “tweetme” button. It seems that it’s on it’s way to replace to fabulous and almost old-fashioned digg it button.

Twitter’s real deal is being real time. All across the globe people are tweeting about what’s happening around them. With Mashups such as twitpic strives to be more than just a text-based service. We’ll see how twitter develops and I hope to see more of those helpful and useful Mashups coming lately.