I am mesmerized by Twitterfall. This is what it must be like to be a government eavesdropper.

Twitterfall is a way of viewing the latest 'tweets' of upcoming trends and custom searches on the micro-blogging site Twitter. Updates fall from the top of the page in near-realtime.

For popular trends, Twitter is queried from the Twitterfall server, and results are pushed to your browser, rather than your browser doing the queries, or your computer polling our server repeatedly.

It's a tweakable Web client for Twitter, filtering by "what" rather than by "who" like your own Twitter

In the left panel you can turn off the gushing general feed and add custom search items -- see only tweets containing the keywords you want to watch. Change them with your mood. Filter for geolocation -- if you're a local tracking "Providence," you might want to limit your radius to filter out national chatter about the Seattle band "This Providence" or random religious mentions.

You can also log into Twitter there and reply to a message, retweet it, follow someone.

In the right panel, you can slow the twitterfall down. You'll probably want to. There's a pause link at the top as well.

What makes it viral is the sense that you might miss something. I just snagged a useful link to When to Start Seeds Indoors from a custom search for "seeds."

Twiterfall'ss interface is clear and intuititve, but if you need more detail, try this: Next Bit Thing: Twitterfall, top Twitter client