This is a message from the immediate future for small to medium-sized businesses, too. Big companies are recognizing the power of their own sites and the agility they have in creating content they control, and they’re spending money accordingly. The same can be true for smaller players.

“Technology is enabling companies to communicate in ever more sophisticated ways directly with their customers, while social networks like Facebook and Twitter offer ways for users to multiply the effect of corporate messages.

Chuck Richard, lead analyst at information advisory and research firm Outsell, says companies now spend more than half their online marketing budgets on their own sites. ‘It’s been 50 percent or more for the last three years,’ he says.”

Today, I’m using this bully pulpit to talk about a website you should not visit. It’s called Tweeteorites.com, and briefly, it is a collection of the most favorited tweets in the past 24 hours.

Now, let’s figure out all the wrong in that last sentence:

1) Favorited – this is a poor excuse for a word. No one who speaks to me in their outside voice would ever use this word for fear of me telling them how silly they sound using it. It is a bastardization of favorite which, to be honest, was just the result of the word favor trying to one-up meteor in 1969. And we all remember how that turned out, do we not.

2) Tweets – to get this one, you have to be either a) a bird, or b) a user of the service twitter.com. According to my analytics, most of you are the latter, and 90% of the former are using IE6, which I don’t acknowledge.

3) 24 hours – As if there are actually that many hours in a day. Whatever.

To jump into exactly why you should not visit Tweeteorites.com, requires a bit of a working understanding of twitter itself and — if I may wax serious for a spell — why Twitter is important right now. See, I used to loathe Twitter. I used to think it was a time sink, a hollow waste of digital space and my hard-won time. On a dare, I tried it. The dare was simple: I was to spend 48 hours following a few interesting people on Twitter, and if I didn’t find a compelling story hidden in the service based on just that 48-hour block, I would get to keep the AirHogs nano zero gravity car.

I lost the car, but gained a new appreciation for this service. Twitter is often confused as a social network. It is not a social network, though it shares many features of larger services like Facebook. Twitter is a social engine, a service that exists to collect 140-character bits of news, activity, links, data, authority, comedy, education — and drive each of them forward in space.

I believe it was Einstein who remarked that real intelligence is the ability to make connections between discrete data sets to create information, knowledge, wisdom. Twitter is that data.

When people ask me about Twitter, why I care, what it’s good for, I always start here: The utility of Twitter is directly related to your understanding of the third-party applications that allow you to interact with it. The programming interface open to developers who want to play with the venerable back end of Twitter is rich, meaning many of the third-party Twitter applications are more interesting than the website itself. Check out Tweetie from Atebits, TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, and Twitterific for all different interpretations on interaction with the service. Then, run a search.

Search for something you’re interested in. Ducks. Project Management. Agile development. Your favorite television show. Just run a search on something that appeals to you and start to scan the results. Rinse. Repeat. What you’re seeing there is a tapestry of a discussion happening in real time, right now.

So who cares about Tweeteorites.com? One of the more entertaining ancilliary functions of Twitter is the “Favorite” — a switch you can use to indicated that a particular post you find exceptional in some way. For most, exceptional = funny. Simple math. Tweeteorites is an aggregator of all tweets with over 100 “Favorites” each and growing. You can survey the list by Twitter leaderboard, by your own followers, and you can see a summary of your own wit and witticism that has made a mark in the Twitterverse.

Tweeteorites is one of a few similar services in the Twitter economy. Favstar.fm does the same, albeit with more splash and fancy. Favrd.com is the original, until founder Dean Allen closed the doors on the service just this week, pulling down the archives and leaving a giant sucking sound in the comedy-tweet space. Sad, but it would appear the void has already been filled with these other services.

Twitter backstory aside, if you’re new to the service, beware. You will loose time. And I’m not talking about waking up on the business end of a cranial event, either. Time lost on Twitter, is time for which we’re all accountable, friends.

That said, follow me on Twitter! You can find me @PeteWright. And while you’re at it, after all this, you’d better throw me a favorite or two, people. Seriously.