Chavez joined Twitter on Tuesday, taking the username @chavezcandaga. His arrival on Twitter was a surprise, partly because only 30% of his country has Internet access (though that figure is far higher than it was before he took office) and partly because he called Twitter a potential “tool of terror” just two months ago.

Chavez — who describes himself as a Bolivarian soldier, a socialist and an anti-Imperialist — said he would use the site to spread Bolivarian revolution. Castro and Morales are two of his strongest allies in anti-American sentiment.

Chavez has acquired more than 100,000 followers since signing up. “This has been an explosion,” he said. Of Twitter in general, he said, “The potential this has … it’s not capitalist, it’s not socialist, it depends on how it is used.”

So sit tight and you might soon see the South and Central American political leaders retweeting one another.  Maybe they will even start a MySpace page or Facebook account!

Topsy:  Topsy is a new kind of search engine, with a new way of looking at the Internet. Topsy doesn’t think the Internet is a collection of documents. Or even a web of documents. Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations. Topsy treats people differently from the webpages they create and the things they say. And Topsy sees that people in every community are connected in a web of relationships, where each person influences other people to read, talk and think about things.

Topsy listens to the conversations taking place all the time on the living, social web. This is the rapidly growing, exciting world of Twitter, Blogs, Flickr, Digg, Yelp, Identica and many other communities. People use these communities to share reviews, opinions, messages, comments and discussions about things. Topsy indexes those things. Topsy indexes what people are talking about.

When you search for something on Topsy, such as “free music“, it finds snippets of conversations that match what you’re looking for. Topsy results are the things people link to, when they’re talking about your search terms. Topsy ranks results based on how well they match your search terms, and the influence of the people talking about them.

Because of how Topsy works, Topsy can do things other search engines don’t usually do. Topsy results are fresh, because they’re based on what you’re talking about right now. Or this week. Or the past month. Topsy has “trackback” pages for everything in its index, showing what everyone is saying about that thing. Conversations are about people, and Topsy has pages for every person it listens to – listing the things you’ve been talking about.

The first index is based exclusively on Twitter statuses and the wonderful people who write them.

OneRiot: Increasingly, the web’s most interesting content is what our friends and other people are talking about, sharing and looking at right now. However, when people search for that content, traditional search engines struggle to surface these fresh, socially-relevant results. That’s the hole – and it’s a big one – that OneRiot is filling.

OneRiot crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services, then indexes the content on those pages in seconds. The end result is a search experience that allows users to find the freshest, most socially-relevant content from across the realtime web.

Crowdeye: Real time … Social … Search … That’s what those of us at CrowdEye are obsessed with. The internet has been evolving for years into a place where information flows quicker and quicker. Now it is becoming increasingly possible to tap into that stream of bits and bytes and use it to draw conclusions and make informed decisions based on the “wisdom of the crowds”.

Twitter is a phenomenon. Its growth is a genuine hockey-stick. It’s everywhere from Oprah to the front page of Time Magazine, and countless Hollywood celebrities are using it. Together with sites like Facebook and MySpace, it forms the core of today’s “social web.” CrowdEye is happy to be part of a thriving ecosystem growing out from this core.

 CrowdEye is a new generation of search engine which looks at the worldwide web in a new way. By tracking discussions on Twitter, we can help our users find out what’s important to them right now in real time. CrowdEye has created innovative technology to scan through tweets, retweets, twitter links and more. We then provide you with powerful yet easy ways to slice, dice, summarize and categorize the data to answer your questions. Whether you’re interested in following your brand, baseball, celebrities, movies, or anything else people are talking about – CrowdEye can help you know what people are thinking.

Who will become the realtime search engine of choice for Tweets all around the world?  The jury is still out, in fact the race has barely even begun.  When you account for Twitter‘s own realtime search capabilities and the other big 3 search engines, I think these companies will need a lot of luck on their side if they are to make impact.  We’ll check back on this in a few months to see what the realtime search landscape looks like.