Five Unlikely Uses for Twitter: Get Traffic Updates, Build a To-Do List and Quit Smoking

If you've been online in the past several months, you've undoubtedly been exposed to the buzz surrounding Twitter, a social site based entirely around short, text messages. If it just seems strange to you be continually updating your "status" from your cell phone for the world to see, you're not alone...but after some research, I found out that Twitter can do a lot more than just send useless status updates. Check out these cool (and useful!) ways to integrate Twitter into your life.

Quit smoking. Yeah, I was surprised, too. Who knew Twitter could help you kick a nasty habit? Well, it can. Quitter is a website that integrates with Twitter to help you keep track of how many cigarettes you've smoked and what kind of progress you're making toward your goals. Cool!

Stay organized and keep track of your tasks. Remember The Milk is an acclaimed task management Web site that now offers Twitter integration. You can add tasks, send tasks to other people, update a task status, and even have the day's tasks sent to you, all from your cell phone! I think that is very cool...and almost eliminates the need for an expensive PDA. Nice.

Get traffic updates. Commuter Feed lets you subscribe to user-submitted traffic updates for your area, so you'll know of any problems on your route. This doesn't seem to work so well for smaller areas (not very many user updating), but for the larger metropolitan areas this service could come in real handy.

Keep tabs on your entire online presence. The Grinding blog has a detailed writeup on how to make Twitter your virtual online assistant, bringing you updates on your content all over the web. Be warned, this will take a while to set up (it involves a couple other web services as well), but once you get it running, it could be a huge time saver.

Promote your blog. Or any other site that spouts an RSS feed. The super cool Twitterfeed allows you turn any RSS feed into to Twitter updates, instantly notifying all of your followers to breaking news, blog posts, or any other useful information.

As you can see, it turns out that Twitter is much more than it appears to be on the surface. In fact, this article is only scratching the surface of what many people are doing with their Twitter accounts. If you're not already Twittering, give it a shot and experiment with some the services I listed...you may become an addict yet!