ReadWriteWeb

Twitter marked its 3rd birthday this weekend and the site that Nielsen called the fastest growing social network last month shows no signs of slowing down. While active participation by users is a great show of strength, the use of Twitter as a platform for developers and aggregate data analysis is the most exciting thing about the company.

The story of Twitter as a platform is just beginning; the most exciting developments are still to come. Below we share our three favorite examples of what Twitter is becoming; these 3rd party uses of the service point the way for the larger Twitter ecosystem to become even more important in the future. We're not talking about Twitter clients, we're talking about Twitter data mining.

Particls, the one-time RSS feed organizer and alerting service, has today launched a new project they're calling "Particls Fountain." Although it's hinted that the service will eventually do much more, today its goal is simple. Particls Fountain will function as a replacement for the long-gone Twitter Track feature that once allowed you to follow topics of interest by keyword.

Lifestream aggregator-turned-social network FriendFeed is the most hyped thing since sliced bread -- or at least the most hyped web app since Twitter. Among the scads of lifestreaming apps, FriendFeed has garnered the lions share of recent press and hype among early adopters. The promise of lifestreaming is that it can bring all the various activity streams from the friends that you follow at multiple services under a single umbrella, vastly simplifying your information overloaded Internet existence. But do services like FriendFeed really solve the problem, or just highlight it? Can they even add to it?