Anyway – I’ve been talking quite a lot about Twitter recently and general social media.

I’ve said this before of course, but social media truly is great for both driving direct traffic to your website and for general search engine optimisation. Of course, different services meet different needs.

Take a look at some of the following social media related articles I’ve written recently.

Specifically, microblogging is fantastic for driving traffic to a website. The build up of following around a specific niche almost guarantees a visit from your followers, because they followed you, so they are very likely to be interested in what you have to say.

What have your experiences been using Twitter to drive traffic?

A complete success or slow progress so far? What problems have you faced when using Twitter or building up an online community following?

How are you feeling? View the day’s global mood swings with this fun, social media, Twitter-powered tool. Click here to choose a feeling and begin.

‘How are you feeling?’ is a quick social overview of the feelings that are appearing in the microblogging community. It pulls down hourly updates of today’s microblogs (or ‘Tweets’) based on specific emotional keywords, and presents these microblogs in an appealing and ever so slightly artistic manner.

Clicking an individual microblog will take you directly to the specific Tweet and allow you to see the otherwise hidden author of that Tweet. Take a look at some of the screenshots below and then try out ‘How are you feeling?’ for yourself.

‘How are you feeling?’ is a social media tool/toy/experiment and dynamic web application, created by myself ever so quickly one lunchtime, using PHP running under the Apache web-server. I hope you enjoy playing with it.

With the currently in development, Ubuntu 10.04, codenamed Lucid Lynx, the development road map is set to take huge advantage of the major social networks. Common social networking actions, such as updating your Facebook status, or sending a Tweet to your friends are set to be integrated directly into the operating system allowing users to keep their friends up-to-date and share information without the need to even open a web browser.

Take a look at the image below. This is a basic mock-up of the new social menu codenamed the ‘Me Menu’, which is aimed to become to a simple, centralised way to manage your social activities. It has options for a user avatar, multiple social networks, instant messaging and microblogging services and the setting and broadcast of custom and preset statuses and microblogs.

This clever menu will link into other social applications, like your instance messaging application. In others words, you set your status in the me menu, and the update is reflected automatically in all your social networks and configured social applications. Related to this, in the diagram above, ‘Chat Accounts…’ will refer to all forms of instant messaging and direct communications, while ‘Broadcast Accounts’ will refer to social networks which allow you to share a status update such as Twitter, Facebook and identi.ca.

The Ubuntu One service will also be integrated into the Me Menu and Ubuntu’s new social infrastructure. This will allow social network information to be synchronised and related to your Ubuntu One login, along with the existing file synchronisation, contact management and note synchronisation services already offered by Ubuntu One.

The Me Menu will be the overall representation of ‘you’ within Ubuntu. If you want more information regarding the Me Menu, which is to become the central social network integrations of Ubuntu, you can take a look at the design specification.

This deal will mean tweets will appear from Twitter alongside normal Google and Bing search results. Without a doubt, this will make Twitter an even larger SEO tool than it already is. Constantly the microblogging service is bombarded with spam bots attempting to promote their services, which is certainly an issue when those the tweets those bots submit provide very little in the way of useful information or news.

With blogging slowly being seen as an activity which can be done professionally, this deal could potentially open the doorway to professional microbloggers, a promotional medium which has so far been the realm of mainly automated agents (or bots) and celebrity/government public relations agencies.

Regarding this deal, Microsoft have already make a move to set up a separate, standalone search page on Bing for microblogging results from Twitter. This is likely to be a preceding step towards integrating the tweets into the main Bing search results. Google will be doing the later from the start, when its microblogging service is rolled out “in the coming months”according to Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google in a recent blog post.

For both companies, this deal will mean the search engines will have direct syncronised access to the tweets almost as soon as they are posted on to Twitter’s microblogging site.