Any folks here have examples, either your own or someone you know, of effective use of Twitter?... Either for increasing sales/clients/business, or for literary purposes, or whatever?
Chapter 1 has a great section called "Creative Uses of Twitter" (& a history of Twitter). Examples range from breaking news & games like Artwiculate to organizing protests & flash mobs. Also, Twitter is adding geotagging [http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/aug/21/twitter-goog...], so you'll soon be able to get feeds for, say, restaurant deals in your area...
Of course, we're a b2b targeted at engineers / sales guys, so we have a strong early adopter / seeker basis for our guys. But yeah, we've driven a worthwhile number of users to our site through judicious (and not even obsessive!) use of twitter. Even had to write a twitter bookmarklet to manage how we broadcast everything.
Later, my wife was stuck in a huge traffic jam, i went on twitter and searched for her location and the word 'accident' and sure enough, up came a link to a web page detailing why there was such congestion and how far it went.
twitter is good for finding out about something that is happening RIGHT now.
edit: i'm serious.