Check it out, @jojeda has published a book called Twitter Means Business about how companies are "harnessing Twitter to engage their customers, promote their products and monitor what is being said about their brands" among other things.

By David Niall Wilson

‘Twas the night before Twitmas, when all through the house,

Not an interface stirring, not even a mouse;

The E-cards were printed with Holiday Flair,

And a Blip.FM Christmas tune hung in the air;

The rugrats were down for the count in their beds

While visions of Playstations danced in their heads;

And ma with her zinfandel, I with cognac,

Had just settled down to build, box, wrap and stack;

When on both of our speakers, there arose such a clatter,

We refreshed our screens to see what was the matter.

To open new windows I sprang in a flash,

Double-clicked Tweetdeck and awaited a crash.

My home page awash in ani-gif Snow,

Gave a holiday luster to the pages below.

When what to my tired bloodshot eyes did appear,

But an @tweet from Santa all filled with good cheer.

A 140 character message so slick,

That I knew in an instant it came from St. Nick.

More rapid than fingers can fly, the tweets came,

And he messaged his reindeer @ each one by name,

“@Dasher! @ Dancer! @ Prancer @Vixen!

@ Comet! @Cupid! @ Donder @Blitzen!

To the Twitter Elite! To the folks at Twitwall!

Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!”

As bits in a torrent with DSL fly,

When they hook up and download with only one try,

So up to the top of the Twitter Trends flew,

Those Twittering Reindeer, and St. Nicholas too.

And quickly I favorited each one as proof,

Of the pokes and the prods of each Qwertying hoof.

Then I started to type a reply when I found,

That the program had closed and the OS shut down.

I turned to the fireplace and sat back in shock,

For despite ADT, the deadbolt, and the lock,

The man of the hour had invaded our space,

And he stood there, arms crossed, with a smile on his face.

He had widgets and gadgets and software and more,

And he spilled it all out of his bag to the floor,

Then he unplugged the monitors, Wi-Fi and cable,

And stacked them all neatly on Ma’s coffee table.

He waved his fat arms and the phosphors, they flew,

And he showed us a new thing that Santa can do,

While all we could do was to sit, and to stare,

He opened up Facebook right there in the air!

He filled in the profiles, our children and friends

And the others neglected by retweets and sends.

He clicked on the X in the far upper right,

And he winked, and it all disappeared from our sight.

Then laying his finger aside of his nose,

He turned to our chimney, and up it he rose.

We heard music and laughter, we rose and we hugged,

Then we glanced at the Internet cables, and shrugged,

For the moment the lolcats and e-mail and Spore,

By their silence gave Christmas a little bit more,

Of the spirit of family, magic and cheer,

That we expect from this time of the year.

We stepped to the window and watched the night sky,

As the sleigh, and the reindeer, and Santa flew by…

But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,

“Happy Twitmas to all, and to all a good-night.”

If that loveably overprotective clownfish had access to Twitter's new and improved Name Search he never would have gone on that extraordinary adventure but there is no need for you to go on such a roundabout trip if you're looking for another Twitter user named Nemo. Or Shaq, or Biz, or Ev. Looking for someone on Twitter? Just click "Find People" in the navigation bar at the top of your Twitter home page.


Twitter is much more valuable when you can find the accounts of the people or organizations you care about—whether they're friends, news organizations, or the airline that will be taking to see your family over the holidays. You'll notice that our new name search is much faster, more relevant, and it even has a phonetic similarity algorithm which is basically fancy talk for spell check on names. For example, if you type in "Even Williamz" it will ask you, "Did you mean Evan Williams?" Try it out!

Thanks to @abdur, @stevej, @robey, @jeremy, @rael, and @bs for bringing this hugely important feature back to life!

Digg has kicked it up a notch on Twitter and created accounts for a bunch of categories. As the Digg community works collectively to find and promote interesting content, the best articles, videos, sites, and more will be available from a variety of Twitter accounts.

@digg_popular every story as they’re promoted to the Digg homepage
@digg_2000 stories that have 2000 or more diggs

Technology

@digg_technews popular stories from Digg.com/technology
@digg_applenews popular stories from Digg.com/apple
@digg_software popular stories from Digg.com/software

World News and Politics

@digg_worldnews popular stories from Digg.com/world_business
@digg_politics popular stories from Digg.com/politics

Science

@digg_sciences popular stories from Digg.com/science
@digg_enviro popular stories from Digg.com/environment

Other

@digg_gamingnews popular stories from Digg.com/gaming
@digg_entertain popular stories from Digg.com/entertainment
@digg_sport popular stories from Digg.com/sports
@digg_offbeat popular stories from Digg.com/offbeat
@digg_images popular images from Digg.com/images
@digg_video popular videos from Digg.com/video

If you follow a few news sources on Twitter you might consider adding a Digg account or two. I'm going to follow @digg_sciences so I can keep up with commercial spaceports and hidden ocean harbor life on Europa.

The fine folks at Norad and Google have apparently done so much math that they've come to believe Santa functions within a different spacetime continuum than the rest of us. They've built a web site so it must be true. Once this was established, it made perfect sense to track Santa as he combines space and time into a single manifold. If all of this sounds a bit too intense, you can just follow his Twitter account: @noradsanta.

Twitter plans to integrate with the open initiatives offered by our friends at MySpace, Facebook, and Google. We officially announced our intent to work with MySpace back in May because we believe strongly in offering the exchange of public information between our complementary services.

Yesterday, Google included Twitter in their Friend Connect program which means folks can stay connected with their Twitter network on web sites that have activated the service. This particular integration did not require effort on our part so it was a quick win for folks who use Twitter and want to connect on participating web sites.

Integrating with MySpace as well as Facebook Connect will require some development effort on our part. Now that we have 13 software engineers working at Twitter and our reliability continues to improve we're getting closer to integrating with your favorite social networks.

Google is integrating Twitter with Friend Connect! With Google Friend Connect, Twitter folks will be able to bump into and recognize each other out there on the web—and discover new people to follow on Twitter. The Google Blog has more info.

We've never had the opportunity to properly welcome Evan Weaver to the Twitter team. Evan joined Twitter in May coming from CNET Networks and before that, SAP. Although he worked remotely from Delaware at first, Evan very quickly became a leader on our infrastructure and performance initiatives. Thanks to his contributions, technical vision, systems experience, and pragmatic optimization strategies Twitter's Engineering and Operations team has made significant progress moving away from early scaling problems.

Evan represents the unique brand of talent we hope to continue to attract at Twitter. None of the founders of Twitter have college degrees but Evan's Master's degree and combined study of philosophy, computer science, jazz, piano, poetry, and bioinformatics more than makes up for that fact. Plus, his strangely offbeat sense of humor regularly cracks everyone up. Please join us in belatedly welcoming Evan and thanking him for his enormous contributions to Twitter's recent and continued success.

Author, actor, and Daily Show "Resident Expert." John Hodgman is a Twitter user and fan. When a recent book tour had him visiting San Francisco Mr. Hodgman managed to make his way to Twitter HQ for a little tour. While here, he took some time to learn about the preparation of toilet wine and we got the inside scoop on his glitzy celebrity lifestyle. All in a day's work at Twitter, Inc.!