A new class of tools intended to surface influencers and the people they are influenced by are focusing on a hub of rapid, connected conversation that's wide open for analysis - Twitter. Could analysis of individual behavior on Twitter become a valuable tool for business development and marketing? A growing number of startup companies are making a case that it could.

On the margins of the developing Twitter-as-business tool ecosystem are startups building light-weight influencer discovery and analysis tools. Two of the most interesting yet have launched in the last 24 hours, in fact.

Shining a Light on Webs of Connection

Still one of the most useful tools in this group, if still largely a proof of concept, is Pete Warden's Mailana. Give Mailana a Twitter username and it will tell you who the top 20 people that user has had reciprocal public conversations with on Twitter - who they are engaging with the most. Want to get into the world of Lewis Shepherd, CTO of Microsoft Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments? (It's his birthday today, by the way.) Then you might consider joining CTOvision.com author Bob Gourley, Purdue University Cyber War Researcher Samuel Liles and Dr. Mark Drapeau in conversation on Twitter. That's who Shepherd communicates with the most there, according to Mailana.

Friendship Discovery As a Service

It may be a sign of market maturation that some companies are now offering APIs for this kind of functionality and others are integrating it into their core products. Yesterday social media aggregator Seesmic integrated into its web application a feature from Twitter recommendation service Mr.Tweet that surfaces what other users or anyone "pays the most attention to" on Twitter. This is really useful - you can discover key people for any influencer you follow with just a few clicks. Did you know that local-blogging guru Lisa Williams is a very close contact of media consultant Amy Gahran? I did because I've been following them both for years - but now you can discover that connection programmatically, with a click.

Performance of the new feature integration is spotty and the user experience leaves a lot to be desired - but it's only been out for 24 hours.

The platform is wide open for analysis and exposing a person's "social graph" is wildly valuable for discovery, context, relationship building and more. There's going to be a whole lot more development in this direction.

Influencer Discovery For Sale

Will people pay for this kind of information? If they are smart they will. Popular Twitter shared link tracking service Tweetmeme released its first paid product this morning and is betting it can monetize influencer discovery.

The new Tweetmeme Analytics service does a number of things, but the most useful feature may be what it calls "retweet trees." Publishers can surface the chain of retweets that passed their links around and see which Twitter users had the biggest impact on a chain of retweets.

Tweetmeme is surfacing other types of data as well and there's potential for that data to be organized, cross referenced and displayed in a wide variety of ways. Tweetmeme is already performing text analysis of the pages being shared on Twitter, so content type could become another axis point to look at the data around.

All of these services are in early days. If people will in fact pay for them, then they will develop all the more. It's a greenfield of possible added value. Finding out who is of interest to people of interest to you is a classic business activity, open social networking like Twitter makes that possible in newly interesting and efficient ways.

Twitter has acquired two other companies so far, that we know of. Search engine and sentiment analysis service Summize became Twitter's own search engine and Values of N sold its assets so engineer Rael Dornfest could be brought into the company. Here are ten other startups we think that Twitter should consider acquiring next. Which kind of company would you most like to see become part of Twitter itself? We've got a poll below.

Some of these we think are likely acquisitions, some less so. In making this list we considered both functionality that would be helpful to have added to Twitter's own site and technology that would be worth buying instead of just building in-house. Whenever a platform company builds technology that a number of other startups offer, there is a risk of scaring other people away from investing in development that the platform could just reproduce. Acquisitions of startups on a platform probably increase the appeal of development though, as it's a chance to get in on the game.

Quite Likely, if It Hasn't Happened Already

Bit.ly is the most full-featured and popular URL shortener on the market right now and was recently selected as Twitter's own shortener of choice, dethroning TinyURL. Bit.ly offers all kinds of smart analytics, from real-time click tracking to semantic analysis of topic keywords from the links that people tweet.

One trusted industry source speaking on the condition of anonymity told us that Bit.ly servers "were moved into Twitter's racks months ago in preparation for this change" [of becoming the default shortener]. Bit.ly is becoming too important to Twitter to keep that functionality outside the company's own shop and the two companies share some investors. We will not be surprised at all if a Bit.ly acquisition by Twitter is announced sometime in the near future.

Could Happen...

Tweetmeme is another fast growing Twitter analytics service that tracks sharing on the service. With another chunk of new features just added today, the service is looking a whole lot like "Feedburner for Twitter" but with even more viral distribution possibilities. The Tweetmeme API is quite interesting and could complement Bit.ly quite well.

Twitpic is a popular way to share images on Twitter. The site faces a strong challenge from ImageShack's YFrog, but independent Twitpic would be a cheaper acquisition and is already well known among Twitter users. (Twitter should probably look at Enjoysthin.gs; it's got the best user experience.) An increase in imagery on Twitter would probably offer the company a lot more advertising real-estate.

Tweepz is a fascinating Twitter search engine that acts like a directory that lets you parse your results using various metrics gleaned from Twitter. Check out this search, for example. Twitter could benefit from making this kind of search available to users, advertisers and researchers - and Tweepz has already built it. See also Twazzup, another company doing interesting things with Twitter data.

Longer Shots

An iPhone app company could be a good buy for Twitter; there's certainly plenty of options. M.Twitter.com is a good mobile service already but someone specializing in super high-quality Twitter apps for the iPhone, Android and Pre could be good to bring in house. It could be AteBits, makers of Tweetie. There may not be enough reason for Twitter to buy one of these companies, though.

A desktop Twitter app company could help Twitter increase user engagement. Many of the most serious Twitter users (though not all) swear by desktop access. Twitter could acquire the most popular and arguably most innovative desktop app, Tweetdeck, or it could bring Seesmic in house. Tweetdeck would be cheap and shares investors with Twitter. Desktop apps may be too limited in appeal to be a compelling acquisition target.

Geo-location could be a good feature to add to Twitter. Search by user location could be made much more meaningful and the list of things that could be done with it is very long. Brightkite is popular and well developed, Shizzow is pretty and wouldn't be expensive. On the other hand, browsers themselves will likely all become more location aware in the near future and Twitter may be satisfied with its current location data.

A semantics company could bring structure to the Tweets, making them more useful and easier to advertise against. Right now links Tweeted are semantically analyzed by Reuters' Calais and sent to Bit.ly, but we wouldn't be surprised if Twitter was interested in scooping up a small semantics shop and helping it scale so that analysis was being done in house. Twitter may feel like semantics don't need to get that close to consumer users, though. (Disclosure, Calais is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.)

Topify is a widely loved service that intercepts your new Twitter follower notification emails and sends you much more useful ones. It's great but probably too easy for Twitter to just reproduce itself.

FriendFeed plus Twitter would be a match made in heaven. It would be an engineering powerhouse. It would be a step towards mainstream user adoption of FriendFeed, a service that can't make up its mind which end of the sophistication spectrum it's targeting. It's also quite unlikely to happen. If there's one related startup we can imagine turning down a Twitter acquisition offer, it's probably FriendFeed. (Though the investment-laden and highly ambitious OneRiot is a close second.) Nonetheless, it would be awesome if FriendFeed's cross-network aggregation, threaded conversations, groups, media support, search and more joined forces with Twitter.

Ultimately, it may be most likely that Twitter's next acquisition will be something vapid. A service that aggregates shopping Tweets, or celebrity Tweets, or something else that will fall short of taking advantage of the Twitter platform's huge potential to change the world. Twitter staff makes relatively simple use of its own service, so hoping that it will acquire companies that make it all the more powerfully sophisticated may be an early adopter's pipe dream. [Update: After some discussion this afternoon, I am thinking it's time to reconsider this position I've held for some time. Twitter staff is not full of dummies, I'm sure, and it has probably been inappropriate of me to write as if that's the case.]

Maybe not, though. We wouldn't be shocked to see Twitter pick up at least a few of the companies above. What do you think? Are there other services you'd like to see become part of the Twitter team even more than the above? It's a wild and woolly micro-content ecosystem out there - anything could happen.

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Doug Coleman, Jolie O'Dell, Dana Oshiro , Lidija Davis and Steven Walling.

Channels

In addition to these real-time streams, Tweetmeme is also focusing on providing channels about specific topics including this one for Earth Day, for example. Thanks to this, it might soon be a lot easier to filter out the noise during a big conference, for example, where it is usually impossible to keep distinguishing between high-value tweets and random invitations for lunch.

Sadly, these channels don't yet feature the new live streams, which is really a shame. It would also be great if we could create custom channels based on keyword searches that are then filtered by Tweetmeme, and presented in a real-time stream. We can't imagine, however, that the Tweetmeme team isn't working on something like this already (and maybe even implementing real-time updates in the mobile version as well).

Tweetmeme's backend is sponsored by Sun through the company's Startup Essentials program. The company also has an interesting business model, and it features some interesting leaderboards and stats about every item.

Twitter and Real-Time: A Marriage Made in Heaven

Twitter and  real-time clearly go hand-in-hand. Just in the last few weeks, we saw the launch of two new real-time Twitter search engines, Twazzup (our review) and Tweetmi, and, of course, there is also Monitter, the grandfather of Twitter real-time services. Tweetmeme's new real-time stream looks like a great compliment to those, and from what we've heard, the team still has a lot of great ideas about how to make the service even better.

Thanks to Marjolein Hoekstra (@cleverclogs) for alerting us to this new feature.

TweetMeme takes the TechMeme model and adapts it nicely, using Twitter as its source of news. Even the new revenue model echoes TechMeme's advertising system. We do like the democratic process it uses to find fresh new content without giving too much weight up front to authority. However, if you like that sort of thing, TweetMeme also has a leaderboard page where it tracks a spin of this concept, weighting the freshest sources first. Louis Gray posted about those features last month.

TweetMeme has not been sitting still with other refinements and features either. They recently rolled out a mobile version of their site, as well as a promotional site button and WordPress plugin.

Patrick Ruffini over at TechPresident thinks this could be the year of Twitter. He cites downtime that Twitter recently experience when two major news events overloaded the service, Macworld and the US State of the Union address, as evidence of the service's potential mainstream appeal. "While these spikes reveal some troubling capacity issues that Twitter will need to deal with, this is the surest sign that the service has gone mainstream in a way not anticipated by its founders," writes Ruffini.

Twitter is fast becoming a serious platform for discourse and discussion. More than a status app, it is being used as a first alert mechanism for the dissemination of news and for immediate discussion surrounding that news. It is the coverage of news events and the continued emergence of citizen journalism that will push Twitter toward the mainstream this year.

Why Twitter Works for News

It's fast. Increasingly mainstream news reporters and bloggers are utilizing Twitter to put up news tid bits as they happen, and commentary as it pops into their heads. For example, Ana Marie Cox, the Washington Editor of Time.com, maintains a Twitter account that is both informative and hilarious. As we recently reported John Dickerson, a political correspondent for Slate, uses Twitter to report from the US presidential campaign trail in near real-time. "It is much more authentic, because it really is from inside the room," says Dickerson of Twitter, which has a visceral nature that reporters are beginning to embrace.

It's open. By embracing an open API architecture from the start, Twitter has smartly nourished a large set of tools that help people use the service. This makes it easier for people to get content on Twitter in the manner most convenient and most comfortable to them, which in the long run should help drive adoption of the service. "The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we've done with Twitter," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told us in September.

The API has also allowed for mashups that filter Twitter content making it easier to find. One relevant Twitter aggregator is Politweets (our coverage), which brings together all the messages sent over Twitter about the US election.

It's two-way. Unlike TV or newspaper, Twitter allows for a conversation. Like its new media brethren, blogs, Twitter encourages discourse and feedback. For reporters that aren't afraid to get down and dirty, Twitter is a golden opportunity to build a rapport with readers and gauge public opinion. It also makes readers feel more connected to the news when they can participate in a discussion about it as it happens, often times with the people reporting it first hand.

It fills a void. As Ruffini points out, Twitter is built for the new news cycle. "Traditional news operated on a 24-hour cycle. Blogs shortened this to minutes and hours. Twitter shortens it further to seconds," he writes. "It's not right for every piece of information. It's certainly not well suited for longer analysis. But when it comes to instantly assembling raw data from several sources that then go into fully baked news stories, nothing beats it."

Some Hurdles to Twitter Discourse

Sometimes, it's too fast. Twitter happens in moments. If you think keeping up with the blogging cycle at big blogs like Engadget is tough, then keeping up with a thousand voices on Twitter is damn near impossible. For the tech-obsessed -- the people like you and I who are on their computers all day already -- keeping tabs on Twitter could easily become part of the routine. But for the mainstream audience, Twitter might need better filtering tools before people can really wrap their heads around it.

Third-party clients like Twitterific can help filter to a certain extent, but they're not perfect.

It can be muddled. One of the strengths of Twitter is that it is a two-way street -- you an talk back to the people who are talking to you. But it's not threaded, so replies get shuffled around and often times, out of context, just become confusing. Further, when everyone is having a conversation at once, things get noisy. Twitter desperately needs a filter.

One recent attempt is Tweetmeme, a Twitter memetracker based on the concept of Techmeme. It works relatively well at figuring out what people are linking to on Twitter, but isn't well suited to figuring out what people are talking about, and separating out those individual discussions (plus, it doesn't filter for language, which can make it a bit confusing if you're not multi-lingual).

It's hard to navigate. There is a learning curve to Twitter. Finding people isn't as easy as it should be (certainly not as easy as on mainstream social networks like MySpace or Facebook, which people are used to), and figuring out who to follow to get involved in the conversations you want to take part in requires some work as well.

Conclusion

Despite some potential hurdles, Twitter is being used more and more for mainstream news coverage. KPBS News San Diego uses Twitter to put out updates about stories, for example, and during the California wildfires last fall it was a must read. The potential for Twitter to be used for news dissemination is something the site's founders realized early on during an earthquake.

With citizen journalism on the rise, it seems likely that Twitter will become an increasingly more important point for the distribution of breaking news during 2008, to the extent that traditional journalists will begin to pay more and more attention to it the way they have to blogs. Twitter won't replace blogging or newspapers, but as Ruffini says, it "open sources the process of developing ideas and gathering news tips, giving us a complete window onto the news cycle."