Twitter has launched a new web page to help people use twitter. The main interesting feature is the new visualization app called Blocks.  We will be writing more on Blocks soon but basically it is a 3D visualization tool to see other twitter users and their relation to you. 

The site is sponsored by Motorola Razr2 phone and also has Motorola ads on the right of the page.  It looks like Twitter is bringing in some cash from companies now!  This is a particularly good fit as you could twitter on your Motorola Razr.  I would think it is the same as any other mobile phone with SMS capability but what the heck, might as well bring some cash in with relevant ads.  

The website is called explore twitter and here is a screenshot.

There are several twitter badges out there already but we quite like the fact that this one is made on Open Laszlo . Laszlo is an open source rich web platform where you can have your web applications run in multiple runtimes (in geek talk). In English, that means you can have your applications run in DHTML / AJAX or Flash.

Anyway, if you want a new customizable twitter badge, check out this one. 

Open Laszlo Twitter Badge 

Here is a screenshot of the settings available.  Just customize to your liking, copy the code and paste it into your blog or website.  Easy.

Thanks for the heads up on this issue from the guys over at Twitter Facts .  It looks like private twitter accounts are made public if you use twitter in facebook. 

See the details in their post here if you twitter + facebook .  

Sean Ammirati at ReadWriteTalk.com has done a nice long and detailed interview with the co-founder of twitter, Biz Stone .  It is a must read for anyone interested in twitter, microblogging an / or start up technology and Internet companies. 

There is a podcast that you can listen to and there is also the transcript listed there for you reading pleasure.  Below are are a couple of quotes from the interview to get you started, but go on over and listen / read for yourself. 

"So, I think, really the biggest thing is to ask yourself: Do I love this product? Do I personally want to use it everyday? Because that ends up just being what makes you want to wake up and run in to work and work on your stuff. It sounds sort of silly because it’s so obvious but I think a lot of people find themselves doing something for money or doing something because they think it’s a really good idea. They just don’t necessarily want to use it themselves. I think that’s a bad scenario to be in."

"Biz Stone: Yeah. The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we’ve done with Twitter. It has allowed us, first of all, to keep the service very simple and create a simple API so that developers can build on top of our infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than our ideas, and build things like Twitterrific, which is just a beautiful elegant way to use Twitter that we wouldn’t have been able to get to, being a very small team.So, the API which has easily 10 times more traffic than the website, has been really very important to us. We’ve seen some amazing work built on top of it from tiny little mobile applications like an SMS timer that just allows you to set a reminder over SMS to call your mom or something like that, to more elaborate visual recreations of Twitter like twittervision.com which shows an animated map of the world and what everyone’s doing around the world with Twitter. Twitter is popping up from Spain and Japan and United States.And that’s very, sort of like, “Look at that!” It’s like staring at a fish bowl or something – an aquarium. You just find yourself getting lost in it. The API has really been a big success for us, and it’s something that we want to continue to focus our efforts on, looking forward."

Twitternotes is an application that allows you to take notes on twitter, anywhere you go. You can also tag the notes too.

Here is an excerpt from their FAQ page:

"What is the purpose of TwitterNotes? The best way to get things done is to keep a record of the everything we have to do/remember. We though what would be the best way to take a note everywhere and Twitter was our answer. Using TwitterNotes, you can twit your note, tag it and it will get added to your note list. Inside TwitterNotes you can see and manage all your notes and tags freely."

Without trying out the service it is not quite clear to us whether each person gets a personal twitternotes account where all the notes are logged or if the notes just go into the public domain. If anyone has clarity on this let us know in the comments.

Other uses? If you were taking notes for a conference or public meeting of some sort this could be of use. But then again so could a word document on a laptop, notes on a pda / blackberry too.

Twitter Inc. has launched a new feature that is pretty crafty.  Basically, you can now pick any subject and find out what is being said in people's tweets, in real time.   It means you can "follow" topics or phrases that people talk about in (public) twitter.   Cool!

So lets say that you want to know when anyone talks about mountain bikes.  You can set twitter to "track mountain bikes" and you will be updated when anyone talks about that subject on twitter.   You can track as many subjects as you like and also unsubscribe whenever you like.

It looks like that now that twitter is stable and coping with its growth, the team at twitter Inc is getting some new features out.  We look forward to see what is next!

For more info on the commands to do tracking, you can see the Tracking Twitter blog entry on the official twitter blog.  They are also listed below for your convenience:

track yoursubject  -  starts to track yoursubject
untrack yoursubject  -  turns tracking off on yoursubject
whois username  -  find out more about the person that sent the message
track  -  get a list of the subjects that you are currently tracking
track off  -  turn all tracking off for your account

Have fun!