Svetlana Gladkova talks about a survey of online tools used by businesses for marketing.

So while you may think that social media tools are heavily employed by businesses for promotion, the survey has a surprise for you: in fact, only traditional internet tools are actually heavily used by marketing people so direct mail and web analytics are leading the game with 46% and 37% respectively. Other popular internet tools include online advertising (used by 35% of companies) and optimization for search engines (used in 34% of all cases).

At the same time the latest and greatest tools that we’ve only been hyping for a few years now all hold quite low shares in terms of use for marketing: for example, viral marketing, blogs, and podcasts each have 6% of companies using them with Twitter holding the last position in the list with its 2%.

Don’t believe the hype, people, thats all I’m saying. There are a handful of people and companies making millions off of Twitter, the rest are still trying to figure out what it is and how to leverage it as a new communications channel.

Twitter is blowing up in a big way. Serious media coverage happening. Early adopters are going from majority to minority in a short period of time. I don’t like relying on 8-12 external services to make Twitter as comprehensive as I prefer it to be.

And why aren’t more web properties accepting OpenID, Facebook Connect and assorted Google services? Straightforward to implement, what’s keeping websites from making these services available?

Twitter could easily become a primary marketing channel. Kind of Like Myspace leapfrogging over Facebook. Back to basics.

Tech Crunch says Whoa, Twitter Mania.

http://www.techflash.com/Google_exec_Twitter-like_service_more_interesting_with_more_data_41218642.html

VentureBeat expounds: Your mom is leaving MySpace for Facebook (but you aren’t).

ReadWriteWeb emits: Facebook’s New Public Profiles: Good for Businesses, Bad for People  

Today, the new Facebook Publisher box asks you “What’s on your mind?” The change is a nod to the rapidly growing social network Twitter where users answer the question “what are you doing?” and then respond with text, links, photos, videos, and more, thanks to an ecosystem of integrated third-party applications that let users share more than just a simple thought.

Facebook is becoming insanely complex, like a 234 button remote control. Apple, some help here, please.

The new Facebook profile, is too lifestreamy, agree or disagree?

VentureBeat says that Twitter has made Dell $1 million in revenue.

Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) says Twitter has produced $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts. People who sign up to follow Dell on Twitter receive messages when discounted products are available the company’s Home Outlet Store. They can click over to purchase the product or forward the information to others.

I think corporate accounts will pay for millions of free users, along with the usual ads thrown in once they figure that out. Targeted ads should be pretty straightward to implement.

I’m back using Twitter again. What a colossal distraction when set to update every 10 minutes. Forget continuous partial attention partial attention, I need to set it to d/l tweets ever 30 minutes.

Most annoying Twitter trend – people who insist on telling me that they are in an airport, or just landed, or just taking off, or complaining about the TSA. Come on people, you can do better than that, or you’re off my list.

Besides being a distraction, Twitter is now full of spam and MLM.

I’ve been getting into yoga and meditation lately and find things like Twitter are the opposite of a centered, focused workday.

Guess following 500 people isn’t such a good idea after all. I do like what I’m seeing with the lifestream aggregators though, waiting to see which ones emerge as the most popular.

Twitter went down for a while this morning. Love the maintenance message.