If there’s a market ripe to consume fee-based Twitter services, it’s businesses looking – and will to pay for – more bells and whistles than Twitter offers. Why Twitter hasn’t already entered this market is a mystery but, then again, everything Twitter does when it comes to revenue seems to be an enigma wrapped inside a riddle.

While Twitter works away on a business plan, CoTweet has launched a new enterprise service that starts at $1,500/month. According to the Wall St. Journal, it’s already signed up McDonald’s, Ford and SunTrust.

So, what do you get for $1,500/month? For one, CoTweet lets companies archive all of their Twitter activity – tweets, retweets, replies, direct messages and mentions. CoTweet also offers analytics – something companies are salivating to access – as well as the ability to let multiple users write and management a Twitter account.

Another company playing in the fee-based corporate world is Yammer, which offers an enterprise version of Twitter. Yammer won last year’s TechCrunch 2008 top award.

One of the more frustrating aspects to Twitter is the inability to get access to a complete archive of your tweets, particularly if you’re someone who shares a lot of interesting links to content and online services.

There are a few work-arounds that can be used to create a Twitter archive. You can favorite all of your tweets or, at least, the ones that are the most interesting. But this is approach is not user-friendly, and finding particular tweets would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

Another approach is using a URL shortener such as bit.ly, which would generate an archive all of your tweets, provided you use bit.ly for each and every tweet.

A more interesting method is using a service called Backupify, which offers a way to backup a variety of online service such as Twitter, Wordpress, Zoho, Flickr, Basecamp, del.icio.us, GMail and Facebook. Backupify offers free Twitter backup, as well as a variety of data plans for other services – 10MB for free, 2GB for $29.95/month, 10GB for $39/year and 50GB for $109/year.

After creating a Twitter archive account, Backupify generates a list of your updates, mentions, direct messages, favorites and followers. Each item on the list has a link to the original Twitter post. In an ideal world, there would be a way to search for particular tweets or see a tag cloud to provide some navigation options but given how little you get from Twitter, Backupify is something anyone serious about their Twitter account should consider.

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• Twitter Archiving Can Minimize The Business Risk of Social Media (businesspundit.com)
• Your Tweets Are Yours: Now Back Them Up (mashable.com)

I did a presentation earlier today about some of the most interesting and useful Twitter-related tools. Here’s a video that was shot using ustream.com. Here’s my presentation on Slideshare.

Video chat rooms at Ustream

Last week, Scoopler, one of the leading Twitter search engines, raised $750,000 in a series A financing from a group of investors that includes well-known angel Ron Conway, who was one of Google’s early backers.

I had a chance to ask Scoopler co-founder Dilan Jayawardane a few questions about the real-time search market, recent moves by Twitter, and Scoopler’s plans:

1. What your take on the real-time and Twitter search markets? For players involved, what are going to be the keys to success?

The key to success will be figuring out the optimal way to deliver the value of real time data to the consumer. Different providers are trying different approach and our belief is that real time web has to be almost something like television, at least once you narrow it down to a given event. The user has to be able to sit back and enjoy a stream of content and media delivered live.

2. Any thoughts on the recent deals that Microsoft and Google struck with Twitter?We knew this was inevitable, traditional search certainly can be improved using input from real time feeds. Still there is plenty of space to provide value to the end user without necessarily having to go head on against say Google.

3. Before this financing, was Scoopler self-financed?
No, Scoopler was funded by Y-Combinator.

4. What will the money be used to do? More people? More features?
Both, hiring is a priority for us and that of-course will lead to a whole lot of exciting new features.

5. How did the financing happen? How long has it been in the works?
We were actually able to close right after we launched although it took a few months to work out the details.

Scoopler, one of the leading search engines for Twitter, has raised a seed round of $750,000 from a group investors that includes Ron Conway and Michael Birch. The involvement of Conway is particularly newsworthy given he was an early investor in Google and Paypal.

The money will be used to expand Scoopler’s team at a time when the real-time search market is starting to attract a growing amount of attention.

Scoopler also said it has launched several new features, including “real-time channels” that show the most popular tweets, links, videos and images in categories such as news, business, technology, politics and science.

Scoopler is among a growing number of real-time search players along with companies such as Twazzup, OneRiot, Collecta, Topsy and Tweetmeme. Earlier this year, OneRiot closed a $7-million series C financing round.

For a summary of the real-time players, check out this VentureBeat story.

What the Blackberry did for mobile e-mail, there’s a new device hoping to do the same for Twitter. Called the TwitterPeek, it’s a mobile device that promises to offer life-time Twitter access for $199.95

Here’s the sales pitch, which sounds like one of those late-night “call now and we’ll throw in a free set of kinzu knives” offers. I particularly like the last sentence of being able to stay-up-to-date with what Ashton Kutcher and other celebrities are saying on Twitter.

From the makers of Twitter and Peek, introducing the world’s first dedicated Twitter device – the TwitterPeek. It’s the easiest way to stay connected to Twitter with unlimited tweeting anywhere, anytime. TwitterPeek is a super thin and stylish device that lets you take Twitter with you and stay connected when and where you want it. No longer do you have to be in-front of your computer to stay up-to-date on what Ashton Kutcher, Lance Armstrong, Ellen DeGeneres, Britney Spears, Ryan Seacreast or Oprah Winfrey have to say.

So, would you buy a TwitterPeek?

Note: Hat’s off to Jeremy Toeman for picking up on the TwitterPeek.

More: The Wall St. Journal’s Venture Capital Dispatch blog has a story on the TwitterPeek, which has raised $20 million in financing from L Capital Partners and RRE Ventures.

An inherent but perhaps under-publicized part of the social media universe is vanity – people are interested in how many friends they have, how many followers, and how they rank within a social media service.

For whatever reason, Twitter has more than its fair share of scoring/ranking services. Among them is

Another ranking service is

Both services are entertaining but I would suggest using TwitterGrader because it offers more interesting and valuable tools to enhance your Twitter experience.

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One of the more interesting parts of the Twittersphere are the services trying to show you the news from around the world based on Twitter activity. Tweetmeme, for example, that display the “hottest” links on Twitter.

Another news service worth checking out is TweetPortal, which aggregates tweets from major news organizations and well-known Twitter users (e.g. Ford’s Scott Monty, football star Terrell Owens). TweetPortal presents these tweets and, if applicable, links within a portal-type interface featuring categories such as World, Business, Sports, Technology and Music.

You can also personalize TweetPortal by registering for the free service, and then customizing the home page to display categories that interest you. For example, sports coverage can be limited to hockey, football and basketball.

Verdict: TweetPortal has an user-friendly interface that makes it easy to see the major news of the day. The ability to customize the home page is particularly appealing.

Retweets (aka RT) are a popular way to quickly pass along interesting tweets, while giving credit to the person who wrote the update. In some respects, Retweets are also a pretty good barometer of the hottest stories or Web sites based on the ideas that something that’s Retweeted a lot must be attracting a lot of attention for a good reason.

Not surprisingly, there are a variety of Web sites that provide information about the most popular Retweets. One of them is dailyrt,a tweet aggregator that collects the most popular tweets, and then displays using a scoring algorithm and filters.

What’s particularly nice about dailyrt is the user-friendly interface that makes it easy to see the most popular tweets, and then drill down to get more details.

Here’s what the the “hot tweets” home page looks like:

And here’s the details that are available if you click on a particular tweet. In this case, we’re looking at Barack Obama’s tweet that has been retweeted 1,000 times.

For more on how to retweet, check out this blog post from Mashable.