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Peter Troast, founder of Energy Circle, a company that sells energy-saving products, has created a new energy-monitoring system that sends his home's energy usage stats to Twitter. Inspired by the open source power monitoring kit from Tweet-a-Watt, Troast's system also sends his home's energy data to the web, but it's not in the form of once-a-day tweets like Tweet-a-Watt provides. Instead, his system uses a monitoring device called TED (The Energy Dectective) to create charts which are annotated by family members then tweeted for everyone to see. If you want to do the same for your home, we've got the info.

In a recent study conducted by IBM, researchers from IBM and MIT found that the average email contact was "worth" $948 in revenue. This is believed to be the first time a specific monetary value has ever been assigned to social network contact. To arrive at that number, the researchers dove into the address books and emails of 1600 IBM consultants (identities withheld, of course) and compared the communication patterns with the consultants' performance in terms of billable hours, projects participated in, and revenue generated.

Today at DEMO09, a company called cc:Betty launched their new smart email service which creates "mailspaces" for your email conversations. These online sites serve as a home for your email discussions, functioning somewhat like a SharePoint site or a Google Group, but far more robust and much easier to create. The collaborative workspaces are populated with the email conversations themselves as well as images, videos, audio files, and more all retrieved from within the email thread. Most importantly, they can be created on-the-fly. All you need to do is "cc: Betty."