Though not the first to do it, Intuit’s tax software company TurboTax is using Twitter to help answer questions people may have about their taxes and the Turbotax software. But there is another interesting twist.

Some of TurboTax’s Google AdSense ads are actually displaying the most recent Tweets that have been registered on the TurboTax Twitter account, and the ad clicks through to the account rather than their flagship website. Here’s an example of what it looks like:

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Wild Freeborn, an 8-year-old Girl Scout in Asheville, N.C., wanted her scout troop to win a free week of Scout camp. The problem is: they needed to move 12,000 boxes of Thin Crisps and Samoans at $3.50 a pop in a bad economy if they were going to have a shot.

So her dad, a web developer had an idea: lets go with Internet marketing.

Apparently, Asheville’s business community is very well connected on Twitter, Facebook, and Craigslist. All were utilized, along with mass text messaging, to get people to buy cookies. They even made a YouTube video.
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Like many on the web, Twitter fascinates me. Most of my interest centers around leveraging Twitter for search and real-time trend appraisal.

But as Twitter’s rise become more and more regarded by the mainstream, there is an element of echo going on, where brands and companies are more and more using Twitter for no purpose really other than because they’ve heard Twitter is big.

There was a recent example of this done by Skittles. They turned over their homepage to Twitter Search results page. This did not go well.
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Although Google indexes many web pages within minutes, it has never been particularly useful at getting breaking, recent results. There is a difficult-to-utilize feature that lets users find only pages from the previous day or week, but this is inadequate to many searcher’s needs.

Often, what is most useful is Twitter Search. Whenever there is a plane crash or an earthquake somewhere, I go to Twitter first.
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During any major event, I like to get Twitscoop going on my computer so I can see what people are collectively thinking about something. Twitscoop measures different words used in Tweets against how often they are normally used, and produces a tag cloud that amplifies the words that are being used more than others.

Obama’s speech had many different words of different size in the tag cloud.

But not Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal.

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YouTube is starting to place more ads from bigger companies in their top videos, marking important steps in the direction of monetizing their user generated content.

Big brands like Verizon, Adidas, and Chevrolet have started buying in-video ads. These ads, which outperform traditional run-of-network ads, are the next step for YouTube to really begin utilizing its vast sea of content.
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The question of how Twitter is going to manage to make money has been floated for the last year or so. Twitter is gaining in popularity to the extent that it is finding mainstream users well beyond the early adopter sphere. That so-called “hockey stick” moment, where unique visitors go off the charts, is happening right now.

So what does Twitter do to make money? Banner ads are a possibility, but is that the best they can come up with? Charging for enterprise Twitter makes sense. But what else?
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Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Barack Obama’s victorious campaign was his unparalleled use of social media and Web 2.0 to raise money, organize, and create buzz. Obama dominated online fundraising and his top YouTube videos were almost universally postive, whereas McCain’s top YouTube videos were often embarrassing.

Knowing that they need to change the game in order to catch up, Republicans are now increasingly using Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace to communicate. In fact, all of the candidates for the head of the RNC are on Twitter, demonstrating the collective view that this is something important for the GOP.
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TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington is probably the best known and most in-demand tech blogger in the world. He has built a site that startups pray to be featured on, and has made a lot of enemies by not pulling any punches. Like him or not, he’s built a juggernaut with TechCrunch and turned it and its events into industry leaders.

But there has been a dark side to his success. Arrington, a former lawyer, has had his family threatened and was recently spat upon in Germany. Due to the most recent incident, he decided that he would take some time off after the Davos Economic Forum in Switzerland.
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The FriendFeed “Like” feature is something that differentiates itself from the Facebook News Feed. Users can actually say if the like some piece of media (whether it be a Tweet, a YouTube favorite, or a FriendFeed comment) and “likes” show people what is worth clicking on in FriendFeed.

This has not been adopted–or copied–by Facebook. But there is video evidence that they have indeed copied good ol’ FriendFeed.
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