The Twitter blog has announced a new feature for the micro-blogging site, with the launch of Twitter Places. This now allows users to tag their 'tweets' with specific place locations, so that readers can see where the tweet was made.

Users can also click a Twitter Place within a tweet to see other recent tweets posted from a particular location. There is also integration with the Foursquare and Gowalla services, which are increasingly popular location-based services, plus an API to allow developers to integrate Twitter Places into their applications.

An article by PC World looks at the use of Twitter's search tool to promote websites and brands.

At the very basic level, the micro-blogging site can be used to search for mentions of a company name or brand, and then following those users or responding to them directly in an appropriate manner. However, smart marketers are also using Twitter to search for more generic words or phrases to find potential customers and then contacting them with valuable information or offers that might be of interest.

Twitter users tend to be more responsive to this type of approach, although if the practice becomes more widespread or abused, that particular channel could be closed. There are also new services appearing that try to automate this process, such as Replyz, which the article says aims to make it easy for marketers to find relevant questions that Twitter users are asking.

Marketers can also use Twitter APIs (application programming interfaces) to create tailored tools to monitor Twitter queries and automatically send direct responses to people, or to constantly monitors trending topics, looking for matches with keywords important to a company.

As reported widely in the press, including The Wall Street Journal, Twitter has announced a new advertising model that they hope will start earning some significant revenue for the microblogging service. Called Promoted Tweets, the ads will appear at the top of results for searches users conduct on Twitter. Eventually, they may appear in the stream of posts users see when they log into the site.

Twitter is gradually rolling out this advertising to users and there are 10 initial advertisers taking part, including Starbucks, Virgin America and Best Buy. The company will start by charging marketers per thousand impressions of their ads. Over time, it plans to move to a more complex model, charging based on how users interact with the messages.

The article says that this new feature could appeal to the millions of businesses who have created accounts on the service to share deals and other corporate updates. Instead of getting users to follow their messages, they will now be able to push their message to users who search any keyword they buy. However, what impact this advertising will have on Twitter's millions of users will have to be seen.

MediaPost reports that Twitter is planning to launch an advertising platform soon, possibly within the next month. This will be the first move towards 'monetizing' the huge volume of traffic that Twitter now generates, to create some revenue back to the business. The challenge facing Twitter is to do this in a way that won't alienate users and makes it clear that 'tweets' or tags have been sponsored or not.

This comes at a time when Twitter is now handling 50 million 'tweets' a day. The Sydney Morning Herald reports on the latest data provided by Twitter, which demonstrates the massive growth in the service, from users writing 5,000 "tweets" per day in 2007 to 300,000 per day in 2008 and 2.5 million per day in 2009. The latest figures represent a year-on-year growth of 1,400% in the short comments being posted each day, with the current levels averaging 600 tweets per second.

The Twitter blog has posted an article about some new enhancements to help users find other people to follow based on topic or themed groups. They have always used some level of suggestions when users sign up for the first time and with the amount of data and activity now going through Twitter, you would imagine that they can now continually improve the relevancy of these lists.

Twitter says that they have "a number of algorithms to identify users across a variety of clusters who tweet actively and are engaged with their audiences. These new algorithms help us group these active users into lists of users by interests. Rather than suggesting a random set of 20 users for a new user to follow, now we let users browse into the areas they are interested in and choose who they want to follow from these lists."

The blog post also says that these lists will be refreshed frequently as the algorithms identify new users who should be suggested in these lists and some that are not as engaging to new users will be removed. Many tend to be A-list users who are highly active and followed, but this isn't a bad thing for new users to see how this micro-blogging service is being used.

As widely reported by the global media, including the BBC, Google has launched a real-time search service as part of its main search results, giving users access to information that has just been published from various sources, such as news, social networks and Twitter (as they announced recently).

Google says that this information will be taken from over a billion pages on the web and reflects the changing nature of content and search on the web. The announcement was made at a special event staged at the Computer History Museum in California, where Google said this was the first time that any search engine has integrated the real-time web into its results page. The new real-time search will also be available on phones and is being rolled out now.

Google's vice-president of search Marissa Mayer was quoted as saying: "This is a technical marvel, getting all these updates in seconds, making them searchable right after they are posted and making them available so that anyone in the world can find them. The updates (on Twitter) are so truthful and so in the moment. That is a really, really powerful part of this. Are you at this event right now? Are you on this ski slope right now? And because of that 'right now' element of it , this is hugely valuable data".

The big news for Twitter this week has been the new deals announced with Bing and Google, as the two search engines start competing to add new functionality and issue press releases. This latest news has been covered widely, such as on the BBC website, and the deals will see messages from the 'micro-blogging' service - or tweets - show up in Bing and Google search results almost as soon as they are posted on Twitter.

Microsoft's Bing search engine has moved first to set up a stand-alone Twitter search page accessible from the main site, whereas Google countered the announcement and said its Twitter search service would debut within the next few months. Although some parts of Twitter already show up in some search results they tend to be for individual accounts or messages that have been archived. Both deals will now take a feed of all public Twitter streams to make them searchable almost as soon as they are sent.

The Bing Twitter search page shows the most popular topics mentioned in the 140 character tweets. Visitors to Bing can also search for specific terms and see relevant messages ranked chronologically, as well as the most popular website links referred to from the relevant posts.

An article in Business Week considers how the use of real-time websites may start driving online business in the future. Following the success of Twitter, the ubiquitous micro-blogging site, the report interviews an investor of this site along with over 20 other companies that are developing the "real-time Web" - the term used to describe the rapidly increasing number of live social activities online, from 'tweets' to status updates on Facebook, to the sharing of news content, web links, and videos.

The real-time web is being considered by some as the Internet's 'Next Big Thing'. Although this emerging sector is so new and currently unfocused in its longer-term potential, apparently many startups are now staking claims in this field and drawing interest from investors.

It is yet to be seen how these websites can turn a healthy profit and drive future growth in the web. Twitter is still exploring ways to generate revenue from its huge user base, while Facebook has struggled to turn its rising popularity into profits. However, with the growth of high-speed Internet connections, a growing number of mobile devices with full web browsers, and new technologies that enable instant transmission of messages and data, the opportunities for real-time communications are growing and now need to be applied to a profitable business model.

Both Twitter and Facebook have been subject to some extreme attacks in the past few days from online hackers who are targeting these high profile social networking sites with the aim of causing disruption to their service. As reported by the BBC, Twitter was taken offline for more than two hours whilst Facebook's service was "degraded" as both sites were subject to so-called denial-of-service attacks.

These attacks can take various forms but often involve a company's servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them. Such attacks often use networks of computers - known as botnets - which are under the control of hackers, often as the result of previous viral attacks or 'Trojan horses' that have infected computers around the world. The strategy is often employed by protestors against, for example, government websites or to disrupt high profile sites for publicity.

As reported by The New York Times, Twitter's co-founders - Evan Williams and Biz Stone - have said they are totally behind the business and have no intention of selling, despite the recent rumours of Google, Microsoft and others showing interest in the company.

Of more interest were their possible ideas to monetise the service, although a firm business model is not yet developed. Possible options are to give companies and heavy users enhanced features for a fee, such as getting introductions to new followers or trying to authenticate a company or person’s identity which is becoming a key issue for users. Search is becoming another key issue as the business develops its real time search engine, using the technology acquired last year so that third-party Twitter services can also use it.

An article by Advertising Age focuses on the potential use of Twitter as a local marketing tool. It uses several examples of companies in the US that have been using this 'micro-blogging' tool successfully to target their local market and to drive new business through specific promotions.

Twitter's real-time messaging service can be used to attract local 'followers' for a business and then to harness that potential customer base with short term promotions or announcements. The other key advantage is the low barrier to entry, as Twitter is free and quick to set up. It just needs the right stratgey and application to make the time spent on developing the tool worthwhile.

The article concludes with 5 tips for local businesses using Twitter - namely, track every sale; recognise the difference between the immediacy of Twitter and the use of other social networking tools, such as Facebook; create a conversation and avoid too much heavy promotion; use it tactically for short term promotions; and alert followers to any special events or activities.

The New York Magazine features a long article about Twitter, the current flavour of the month and the latest 'hot web company' that is apparently being courted by the likes of Facebook and Google. The problem is, as the article reports, although this 'micro-blogging' service has become huge over the past year, there is no long term plan to make revenue as there are some limitations to how advertising or other options could be used. The report assesses the differences between Twitter and Facebook, with a review of how this increasingly popular service is being used.