Last morsel of a half baked thought: I know you know, but I wanted to write this down any way.  Twitter as a search for real time events is absolutely unparalleled. For events that are happening right now — as in the past few minutes, hours or even days, there’s nothing that touches it.  You can’t count on Google, because by its nature Google indexes web pages — and doesn’t quite rank Twitters high enough for topical queries.  For events, for example, that are particularly ephemeral and idiosyncratic, no one may find it important enough to write a post / article / web page on.  That’s besides the fact that it takes time to write.  And time to index.  On Twitter people are yakking about all manner of things.  The 140 characters allow people to easily communicate on tons of things, also including the ephemeral and idiosyncratic.  And it happens instantly.  Example?  Blinksale.com is down.  Wondering if anyone else had noticed.  Google can’t tell me anything substantive.  Even if I shorten by time period.  Or narrow by Blogsearch.  But Twitter has.  Awesome :)