OK, so we’ve moved from plain old information overload to people overload!–that is, how do you keep track of all the news, status updates, photos, messages etc. from everyone in your various social networks?

One promising, fun, and intriguing, though still imperfect solution, comes from Chirp. If you download Chirp’s Chripscreen, you can seemessages and content from your friends and connections from a wide range of social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and others, all gently “floating” onto your PC in a very elegant and pleasing manner.

Its set up as a screen saver, but Eve Phillips, the CEO of the firm told me that the firm is planning on adding functionality so it can run as a sidebar. It also does not yet have enough personal controls built in yet–eg. deciding whose updates to see from which network, but apparently this is all in the works too.

In the meantime, I would recommend anyone that is wondering how to keep track of their various social contacts to give Chirp a try…(I’ll be covering it in some depth in the April issue of The Information Advisor) to go along with my piece on the potential of Twitter as a business research tool.

I’m in the process of researching the topic of the use of Twitter as an actual tool for doing useful research. The results of this will be published in the April issue of The Information Advisor, but so far I’ve been able to locate two different sites that permit levels of keyword searching of recent Twitters–that’s the first step at least: These are:

 Twitterment and TweetScan

Of course there’s more to a good research tool than the ability to conduct a search–the content has to be valuable and useful too…and there is a possibility that Twitter could be used for near real-time and archival business intelligence, and competitive intelligence as well as for identifying trends–maybe! That’s what I’m looking into now.