We've been hearing some rumblings about the new Twitter application Twitter Analyzer and we just couldn't resist giving it a try. And BOY, the things we learned about ourselves - Twitter Analyzer gives you more insight about your Twitter account than any other Twitter analytics package we've ever seen - and it's free, to boot.

There's no shortage of Twitter analytics services out there - everybody's trying to cash in on the Twitter craze, and some are having more success than others. Twitter Analyzer is going to be one of those who achieves success - you can tell that after a five-minute test drive of the site. Twitter Analyzer is poised to become the schoolyard bully of Twitter statistical services, sending the other Twitter statistic applications crying to their parents about how the big bad Twitter Analyzer took their lunch money and gave them a wedgie.

Twitter Analyzer tells you about your Twitter account - practically everything you can think of to tell, and it does so with a sleek, attractive and FAST interface that doesn't mess around with random services - it does what it says it's going to do, analyze your Twitter account - and that's it. Refreshing.

The depth of the analytics is pretty impressive. For example, they go far beyond showing you how many followers you have - they actually show you what your "reach" is by analyzing who retweets your tweets and how often your @username is exposed by other Twitter users. It's a far better way of measuring impact on a service where getting retweeted is often the key to success. They have impressive statistics about your Followers, as well - they can break them down by gender, by follower count, by location - practically any dimension that Twitter currently keeps track of, Twitter Analyzer will show you. They really went whole-hog on this one.

Twitter Analyzer isn't without its flaws - although they're pretty minor. They reported that I had zero retweets, when in fact I have hundreds; this is most likely a short-term problem that they'll fix sooner or later. One other frustration was that, when browsing my most often shared links, there was no way for me to actually click the link and see where it goes. Since most Twitter users use URL shorteners, simply showing the URL doesn't tell me much - they should either resolve the destination URL using the URL shortening service or allows users to click the links to see where they go themselves. Again, an easy change.

Currently Twitter Analyzer's route to monetization seems to be "featured users" - users whose Twitter profiles show up in the sidebar while you're checking out the analytics for your own account. We're not sure if that's going to be their only route to success - they could easily create a "pro" version of Twitter analytics and charge a nominal fee for its use - but for the time being, at least, Twitter Analytics is free and offers a set of features so huge that it could very well put some of the paid analytic services right out of business. If their usage becomes heavy enough (which seems likely, given how good a service it is), they could probably subsist on the "featured users" scheme alone.

In short - if you use Twitter for any kind of marketing, brand advocacy, or just about any business use at all, you'll want to check out Twitter Analyzer - it's just too good not to take a look at. Best part? You don't have to authenticate - so you can spy on your Twitter competitors and see what's working and not working for them.