Saw this on TechCrunch this week:

Twitter [and Facebook] “will surpass Google [as a source of traffic] for many websites in the next year.” And just as nearly every site on the Web has become addicted to Google juice, they will increasingly try to find ways to get more links from Twitter. Because Twitter equals traffic…these Twitter links “convert better” than search links because they are often pre-filtered and come in the form of a recommendation from someone you are following.

This is a good point. Now that there are no more gate keepers to filter what gets published, everything gets published and we rely on filters (bloggers, friends online) afterwords to help us find the best stuff. Twitter is a great tool for networking with like-minded people to help you find the stuff you’re interested in. I rely heavily on the opinions of bloggers that I trust to point me to where the good stuff is at. This is the best reason, so far, for getting a business involved in Twitter.

P.S. Google has added a Creative Commons filtering capability to its Image Search results to allow you to find images without having to pay a stock photo company or steal an unlicensed picture from Image Search. The option isn’t currently available on the user interface, but you can enable the filter by adding a certain parameter to your search URL (in this case, just replace “mountains” with whatever you are actually searching for)

• For public domain images — http://images.google.com/images?q=mountains&as_rights=cc_publicdomain
• For images licensed with Creative Commons Attribution (that is, images you can use as long as you attribute the image back to the creator) — http://images.google.com/images?q=mountains&as_rights=cc_attribute
• For images licensed using Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike — http://images.google.com/images?q=mountains&as_rights=cc_sharealike

I got the image above from Wikimedia Commons. Nice!