I’ve figured out a way in which twitter is quite useful. Summize lets you search what people are saying about things in real time. For instance, during the NBA finals Sunday night I was able to read reactions to the game minute by minute.

This can be handy for anything that’s current and won’t be indexed in the major search engines or big enough to have been written up by the local newspapers. For instance, if a web site goes down you can see if other people on twitter are experiencing the same problem. In that case, you could also use Down for Everyone or Just Me, but you get the idea.