As an Iranian-American, I am absolutely proud of the numbers of people in Iran that have taken to the streets to demand that the results of the recent Presidential elections be verified.

I have developed an addiction to the Twitter feeds that have focused on breaking news inside the country. Specifically, I have been checking out the tweets of @persiankiwi, and following updates of #IranElection, which seems to get a new tweet every second or so.

Here are some interesting things that happened today during this worldwide use of Twitter to share information about the Iranian reaction to the election results:

Twitter had originally scheduled a maintenance window of 90 minutes of downtime for around 9:30pm Pacific time (which would have meant that Twitter would be down early this morning in Iran). Amazingly, after thousands of users (including myself) sent tweets to Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and @twitter, the hosting company that Twitter works with, NTT America, actually rescheduled its maintenance to coincide with 1am in Iran.

For quite a while, people were re-tweeting a message that the Twitter tag #IranElection was being "blocked" inside of Iran, and that users should migrate to one of several other hashtag feeds. Well, this seems to be false, of course. I don't know where this original message came from, some on the feed seemed to think that supporters of Ahmadinejad had hopped onto Twitter in an attempt to disperse the feed into smaller subgroups. In any case,  after a few hours, messages such as "#Iranelection blocked in Iran rumor was debunked hours ago. Don't spread misinformation. use #Iranelection" had begun to appear, and now #IranElection is still at the top of the "Trending Topics" list.

I was also quite impressed with the amount of people have set up proxies to help users inside Iran get around potential Internet access blockades by the government. As the government of Iran should be able to block access to proxy servers based on publicly posted IP addresses, many Twitter users were attempting to distribute proxy info via direct message, by posting tweets such as "setting up a new proxy IP for people of Iran. I need some1 in contact with them 2 add me so I can DM the address to them."

Here are a few links that might be useful for people looking for more information about the actions taking place in Iran right now:

• How to setup a proxy for Iran citizens
• Iran-news.info seems to be aggregating International News reports about Iran
• This is an interesting site that talks about what some protestors in Iran may be seeking.

Earlier this week, I wrote a blog post on ProgrammableWeb.com about the Y2K-bug-like "Twitpocalypse." This programming issue basically concerns the maximum amount of numbers the default MySQL integer field type can hold. This limit is 2,147,483,648 - and the idea is, if the maximum amount of tweets in the Twitter system exceeds this value, Twitter chaos would ensue. Well, honestly, I thought that the Twitpocalypse was all hype, because I couldn't believe that many programmers would make the mistake of using the default integer type to store tweet id values. Well guess what? The iPhone twitter client I use, Twitterific, has been bombing all weekend. Why? It has succumbed to the Twitpocalypse!

What is Twitter really good for? After the latest wave of media-fueled adoption, will we have some lasting, essential and unique implementations of Twitter feeds? Really, what can Twitter do that other communications systems can't?

One absolute slam dunk use of Twitter is for businesses that feature a daily specialty to communicate their flavor of the day via tweet. A prime example is, of course, woot.com's 250,000+ follower Twitter feed. Woot.com sells only one item each day, everyday, and following the service through woot seems to be an efficient method to keep up with the daily offer. Berkeley's Cheeseboard collective offers a single type of Pizza each day, and iSchool alum Kevin Lim has created a robotic Twitter feed that scrapes the collective's website and posts the results to Twitter. Why doesn't Cheeseboard take the time to provide its own tweets? Another potential business that could benefit from Twitter is Berkeley's own Yogurt Park. In seconds, using a cell phone, Yogurt Park could tweet its ever-changing list of yogurt flavors to Twitter. Not only would customers be happy to know what options are available to them, but simply being reminded each day, everyday, that the service exists would be great advertising for a small business.