Love it or hate it, Twitter is really a pretty amazing thing.

I’ve been using twitter for a little over a year now, and I’ve gone through phases ranging from daily use to weeks without tweets. Overall, I’m a fan and I think it’s a “cool” technology.

Granted you’re always going to have the annoying too much information or 100-tweets-a-day type of annoyances that really nobody likes. But, you also can really do some cool things.

Example 1
I posted a “tweet” regarding my frustration at Best Buy for canceling my order for a $9.99 52” television. CNN reporter Abbi Tatton, searching Twitter, finds my tweet and looks up my contact information. I am then interviewed and referenced on a CNN airing of “The Situation Room” and also countless online news sites that seemingly feed from CNN. A mild 15 minutes of fame that is then followed up by a radio interview about the whole situation. The entire thing started because I posted a tweet – and that is just amazing to me.

Example 2
Yesterday I had a pretty creative idea for Google Voice, a service I have been happily using for about 6 months now. I thought it would be pretty cool if Google Voice had the capability to set a wakeup call. This would be set just like any other alarm, and then maybe even have the wakeup call go to different phones on different days.

Surprised at myself for actually coming up with a good idea, I post a tweet directly to Craig Walker (co-founder of GrandCentral and top dog at Google Voice now) about the wakeup call idea.

He replies: “@vanberge love this idea”

So, very possibly this functionality may actually make it into Google Voice some point down the road… All because of Twitter. I was able to directly pitch an idea to the person that can do the most with it. Simply amazing.

Like I said – love it or hate it, Twitter makes some pretty cool things possible. Here’s to hoping for a wakeup call functionality to show up soon under my Google Voice settings page.