Twitter isn’t just a short messaging service – it’s a major communication platform that can be sliced and diced for all kinds of competitive and market intelligence research. And news writing. And who nows what else.

Last month I wrote a post at ReadWriteWeb titled “The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Heroes on Twitter.” It was all about a service called Mailana where you can plug in any Twitter user name and get a chart and graph of the other Twitter users that the user in question has had the greatest number of reciprocal public @ conversations with. It’s a way to systematically identify the influencers of the influencers in any field (on Twitter).

Just to prove to myself that it works in any field, I did a search of user descriptions in Twellow for the words “veterinary medicine” and found one of the top Twitter users in that field. I then ran her username through Mailana and was able to discover 13 people that she speaks publicly with most regularly on Twitter. It was pretty cool.

Tonight Tantek Çelik helped me figure out how to make a bookmarklet that you can push while on any Twitter user’s page to view their Mailana graph of closest connections. It’s awesome.

And so I present for your drag-to-toolbar pleasure…

Mailana – The Twitter Social Network Analyzer.

Please use it for good and not evil. And don’t let anyone tell you that there aren’t serious use cases for Twitter.

You can join me on Twitter here.