• Business Week, Friday, May 16, 2008 10:15 AM

Loads of new applications and services are growing around the Twitter platform, leading some to suggest that the microblogging service could become a powerhouse in social media. Businesses such as H&R Block and Zappos are now using Twitter to respond to customer queries. And market researchers look to it to scope out minute-by-minute trends.

Dataminers like Seattle's Visible Technologies are helping companies such as Hormel Foods and Panasonic pore through millions of "tweets," finding customers talking about their products. Dell, a Visible customer, scouts out the tweets and dispatches its Twittering workers to jump into the conversations. At a conference last week, the company claimed to have boosted sales through these efforts by $500,000 in recent months.

Like Facebook, Twitter has a large and vigorous developer community. "It's already a platform, a classic textbook definition," tweets Jonathan Yarmis of AMR Research. David Troy, for example, founder of Roundhouse Technologies in Baltimore, recently launched a geography application called Twittervision, where you can click on a country--say China--and see the tweets as they appear. Another application, called Twistori, shows a stream of Twitters showing what people are wishing, feeling, thinking.

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