In spite of all the talk about using Twitter for marketing and networking purposes, I still see a lot of people who dismiss it as being a waste of time or just a bunch of useless updates about what people are doing at any given moment.

Well, there are some really useful things about Twitter, even if you don't actually use it yourself.

This morning I found that I couldn't access the Aweber website, and the optin forms on some of my websites weren't working properly (or even showing up in some cases). Rather than email Aweber's tech support or try to get hold of a couple of friends to see if they were having trouble, I just hopped on to the Twitter Search site and did a search for "aweber".

Up come a whole bunch of Tweets about problems with Aweber this morning, including one from Aweber themselves that said they were working on the issue.

Even Google News won't usually have this kind of stuff that quickly.

If you've got a question about something that is used by a lot of people, Twitter can be a great place to get some more information about it. And with more and more companies like Aweber using it to post updates, it's a good way to keep on top of anything that's going on with services you use.