Twitterfallin’ in love again…

Sing along with me.

Fallin’ in love again,
Never wanted to.
What am I to do?
I can’t help it.

The world of search on Twitter is growing again, giving Twitter the ability to be an even stronger news source.

Twitter has updated its own web interface for most users (the rest will get it soon) to let you search tweets and see the top trending topics right from your home page. Simply look for the search box in the upper right corner of the page.

It is a great tool for anyone who wants to find the latest information on topics, the latest news or follow an event where people are tweeting. Search ‘stem cell’ later on Monday as the President announces his new stem cell research plans, and you’ll no doubt find a lot of information streaming through the Twitterverse.

A couple of other programs put a different user interface on the trends. Twitscoop was one of the first. It puts the top 30 or so trending topics in a tag cloud and lets you mouse over to see some of the most recent tweets on a topic. You can also create an embeddable Twitscoop cloud for your blog or site.

But the hot new kid on the block is Twitterfall. The site delivers you a live stream of Twitter talk, where you can control the speed of the flow to as fast as a seizure-inducing 10 tweets per second. You can also check off a box for any of the top trending topics and Twitterfall will give you a stream for that specific topic, or you can set your own search Twitterfall, to give you the most recent tweets on any topic of your choosing. it’s a great interface, and mind-numbingly engaging. You can’t help but watch. It’s tweet crack. Twit-nicotine.

Cue the music again.

But the growth of these services highlights one big difference between Twitter and Facebook, and a difference that suggests there is room for both in the wacky world of web. Even after Facebook rolls out its update this week, it is a walled garden. You approve your friends (or companies) that you want to follow, and only then do you see their real-time updates. For many people, that’s a perfect solution.

But if you’re someone who wants to get the pulse of the general public on topics, Twitter (and all these search applications) let you reach a wider world that you don’t already know. Different audiences – different platforms.

So check them all out, and the next time you are looking to be hip and ummm, trendy, you might want to give search and Twitterfall a try.