Where do you find links of interest? Is it really from Google? I was looking up information on the Facebook purchase of FriendFeed and found an article talking about Facebook being the next big search engine…Google’s “real” threat. At first you probably go, “psssh, whatever,” but there was a time when you said that about HotBot too.

Since I’m on the computer all day at work and monitor my company’s Twitter account, I’m watching Twitter all day, my own personal account included. So when I discovered my web sites were down I tweeted about it. In reply I was told that my hosting service, 1&1, had a major outage. Curious, I started a Twitter search feed to see what people were saying about the outage. And people were pissed.

I’m not sure if it’s sad to admit that I know get most of my news links from Twitter than your regular RSS feed, but that’s the way it is. However, there’s a fine line when getting Twitter links from article sites is more annoying than useful. Of course, the opposite is true to. If you have a blog, and you use Twitter, you need to combine them.

Mosey along now, nothing to see here. That’s what I saw Friday morning when I tried to log on to my Twitter account. To say it surprised me would be an understatement. And as of this posting my account is still suspended without any hint as to why or for how long…but it’s not like I haven’t tried to find out.

For me, the death of Billy Mays has been different than the passing of other recent celebrities. Sure, Michael Jackson died and that is and should be a big deal. He did a lot for music and reached heights of fame no one will ever reach again. But I just didn’t see Michael Jackson last week on TV, or read his Twitter, or see candid pictures. I was more connected to Billy Mays than any of the big names that died recently. Jackson’s death was a shock, but Billy’s death …

Part of the fun in using Twitter is the ease by which you can share photos and even video. Twitpic was one of the early services that offered mail-to-Twitter but now Flickr has finally gotten their act together.

I never really bothered with my MySpace page, I didn’t use my Facebook page. Instead I hopped on Twitter. Twitter made more sense to me for what I wanted to get out of it. Twitter is truly a tool that can be used in many different ways. I made some new friends by way of Twitter and, despite best efforts, quickly found that many friends lived in one of two worlds - Twitter or Facebook.

We’re in a time of short URLs. With the Twitters and Facebooks and everything else, the links we share with people need to short. Services like TinyURL and TwitterHat turn a long web address into something text message friendly, but do short links make your actual domain and address meaningless?