Twitter has given rise to a phenomena that is taking interesting directions. Effectively Twitter allows people to act as human sensors and report on events. These reports could be either description of an event or an opinion on an event. In a sense every tweet is an event — either description or meta-event (an event about an event).
Each tweet may not be very important but an aggregation of tweet along space-time-theme dimensions starts giving rise to understanding a situation. In fact, if one could store these tweets over some time and then play with those, some interesting trends and insights may be gained from such micro behaviour. This is the beauty of what Twitter brought to Internet.
In our research group, two of my associates (Vivek Singh and Mingyan Gao) and I got interested in developing such tools and have put together a simple environment to start exploring event analytics. An early version of this is available at http://drishti.calit2.uci.edu/twitter/ . Feel free to play with it and provide us feedback on what kind of features you would like to see in such an environment.