It has been a wild ride for Twitter over the last six months and Twittown has been here to support and document the way. We started the Twitter Forge to enable Twitter users to find the best 3rd party Twitter tools for their use, enjoyment and productivity. This week, we have passed a milestone. There are now over 100 Twitter Applications, plugins, mashups, services and other useful twitter items listed in the Twittown Twitter Forge .

It is amazing at the speed and conviction of the 3rd party developers in getting such a range of Twitter related applications to market. There is still some speculation around the web whether Twitter is a fad or not. We think the concept is not a fad, 100+ companies developing applications around Twitter obviously see some sort of future for Twitter.

There has been a proliferation of Twitter clones and other competition lately. How will this affect Twitter? While no one knows for sure yet, we can be sure that Twitter has a signifigant "first mover" advantage over the others. There has been talk around the blogsphere that twitter is lagging behind in functionality and that there are now better services out there. That may be the case but it is not a small effort for users to tell all their friends to move over to a new service. We think Twitter has some time (albiet not much) to step up to the plate and add more functionality to the service. Everyone is waiting to see what their next move will be that takes them to the next level and catches them up with the features of the competition.

We would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate all the 3rd party Twitter developers and the Twitter community. If you have a Twitter related application (or know of one) that is not listed in the Twitter Forge , let us know and we will get it posted.

A magazine reporter from has contacted us today asking to help look for the most remote Twitter users on the planet. They would like to chat for about five minutes with a few people in the strangest, most awkward, most remote places in the world...that are using twitter.

This should be a VERY interesting angle / article and If you are interested to participate (only need 5 min phone call with you) please email us at info@twitterforum.com. Please state your location, how / why you use Twitter and any other relevant ways to contact you.

The only other requirement is that you speak English, French, Spanish or Italian.

This should be fun. We will keep you posted.

The Wall Street Journal has a good article up about TV networks and their shows are coming to twitter . NBC, CBS, ABC and MTV are all already there and they are catching on that the Twitter population is mostly "early adopters" and people of influence in the online world such as bloggers and editors. Good people to tell others about their TV shows.

Are we ready for the marketing to hit Twitter? We think it is no problem actually, if you don't like a channel, user account or marketer just delete them from your friend list and you will not be affected. Simple as that. If you don't want people to follow you and your account, make it private.

Another interesting tidbit in the article is that they say that twitter is only getting 360,000 page views per month (June 2006). From our previous look at the stats, we found the same. Maybe there is just a plateau and they are getting ready for another big spurt of growth. Maybe from the marketers?

Thincloud has released a cool web based Twitter client built just for the iPhone .

It even uses SSL to encrypt your login credentials.   

"Tweet your Google Calendar " is the tagline that Twittercal has at the top of their website. As the range of Twitter applications grows it seems logical that more and more productivity ideas and ways to use Twitter in this regard will come to light.

Twittercal is a twitter bot that allows you to send a special coded message via twitter, through any twitter channel (web, sms, mobile, twitter client etc.) that will update your calendar at Google.

While it is a good idea in theory, I would have thought that most business people have a blackberry or other smartphone that does calendar already. Then again, maybe this isn't only for business people!!

That is about 60,000 new Twitter accounts per month. Not as astronomical as we would have thought but respectable for sure. Also it is reported that there are now over 340,000 public Twitter accounts.

Info thanks to our friends at Twitterfacts and Twitdir . Thanks for the update guys.