Twitterfall has been around for a month now, and if you’re a journalist, this is a must-see – for about ten minutes. Then it becomes a must-use.

Yes, this is Yet Another Twitter Interface.

But.

This is Twitter on crack…  

On rollerskates…

In a jumpsuit.

Here’s what it does:

You can choose to watch all tweets go by, or log in and watch the tweets of those you follow. Thanks to Comet technology (apparently) it is (apparently) faster than Twitter’s own search service when pulling the most popular terms (see comments for explanation).

You can alter the speed from 0.3 per second to a mind-scrambling 10 tweets per second.

You can see the most popular terms of the moment, and just follow tweets containing those keywords – or enter your own search term (a la Monitter) and monitor tweets that mention it.

You can combine keywords. 

You can also add a location to narrow it down to tweets that mention that word in that location (again a la Monitter). The words Mumbai and Chengdu come to mind. 

Unlike Monitter you can use Twitterfall to post tweets yourself, to favourite tweets, reply, and look at twitter users’ details – and just hovering over a tweet pauses the whole thing.

You can also follow a user with one click – a feature even clients like Tweetdeck lack.

You can filter by language and choose to exclude retweets.

You can save favourite searches.

And you can customise the appearance of the interface including the font size.

This is quite simply the best interface I’ve ever seen anyone design for Twitter – and I have seen a lot. It is fast, flexible, customisable, and web-based. And it’s only a month old. 

If they ever create a mobile version of it (and it does sorta work on an iPod Touch/iPhone) I’ll probably explode. One request, though – I’d like a Twitterlocal-style ability to just look at local tweets without needing a keyword too.

The fact that it was made by two students in York here in the UK also pleases me no end. You’ve just saved me 30 minutes every week convincing newspaper editors where the value lies in using Twitter – thank you.

UPDATE: Here’s a pic of Twitterfall being used on the big screen in the Telegraph newsroom (via @juliansambles):

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