Have to give props to my colleague Ian Da Silva for finding this, which is a blend of my two favorite research topics right now – Prosumerism (getting “customers” directly involved in the creation process) and Twitter – TwitShirts. If you opt in via the website, any of your wonderful tweets can be purchased as a t-shirt by other people that want to wear your thoughts on their sleeve, er, chest. If somebody buys it, you get $1 – and of course there is a handy Twitshirt tool you can drag into your toolbar to expediate your own purchases, if you so desire. Just a fun application for those that might want to give one of the people they follow the ultimate Re-Tweet… I’ll give my first shot at a twitshirtable tweet shortly. Be kind .

If you start a new business, it is likely to fail – and one of the main reasons is that it can be so difficult (and expensive) for small upstarts to get the word out to enough people to make a real go of it. In turn, it’s always great to hear about newish companies that are finding a way to leverage tools like Twitter to reach their customers for free – and it’s even better when you can see some actual numbers behind the experiments. Naked Pizza – a New Orleans healthful Pizza shop that’s backed by Mark Cuban – is one such story, having tested a Twitter-exclusive promotion on April 23rd that led to no less than 15% of that day’s business. You can read all about it here.

It’s easy to lose sight of it, but the ability for companies large and small a like to reach out directly to customers – for free- is a rather transformational change to underlying marketing models. And companies like Naked Pizza that show just how powerful the platform can be is #295 of the things I find awesome about Twitter (and yes, I’m applying the numbers at random ).

In homage to the amazing success of 1,000 Awesome Things (great job Neil – and you were awesome on the panel at our conference two weeks ago!), I thought I’d start profiling 1,000 Awesome Things that are happening on Twitter as I continue to explore how different people, companies, and other organizations are using the service. In order to kick it off, I wanted to start with a recent and high profile (if you like entertaining sports writing) conversion – The Sports Guy deciding to hop on the Twitter train. Let me briefly explain why.

When I did a presentation on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, I opened with a simple question to the audience- “forced to choose between Twitter being a ‘useful application’ and being a ‘waste of time’, which one would you pick?”. The room was split roughly 2/3s useful, 1/3rd a waste of time (which made sense given the audience), but what was more interesting is that few could give a straight answer without any qualifiers – “I think it’s useful, but…” or “it seems like a waste of time, except…“. Few could really commit one way or the other. If I’d posed this question in April, and The Sports Guy had been in the audience, he certainly would have been in the latter group – and almost certainly wouldn’t have used a qualifier. He was very, very vocal in his belief that Twitter was a total waste of time.

Then he abruptly changed his mind – as he discussed on his blog on April 30th, and has mentioned more than a few times in several columns (I read them all and can’t remember which one). As he notes, after being fascinated by his hometown Patriots using Twitter to announce draft picks over the weekend, and hearing from the creators of PTI how they were using Twitter to solicit show ideas and questions, he became interested. And then converted. And as far as I can tell from his recent activity, addicted.

He’s now got one of the most entertaining and informative accounts in Twitter (approaching 100,000 followers very quickly), and it’s a fabulous way to stay up to date with what’s happening in the Sports World. I know more than a few people who often wait, and wait, and wait on the ESPN site for any new Sports Guy column to pop up, and it has seemed over the last year with the growth of his podcasts, writing his book, and other activities full articles have been much less frequent than before (though he is still quite prolific). His twitter account helps fill the gaps for his legion of followers.

And what makes it really interesting for me is that, from what I can tell, the Sports Guy’s entire career has been a case study in the power of the Internet as it evolves. While it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the “world is falling apart!” stories swirling around the news media, here’s a guy that basically started a blog while he was a bartender in Boston, who over time has been using all the appropriate social media tools that come along to find a massive, global audience (seriously – he’s huge in Pakistan). His about-face to suddenly not only accept Twitter as useful, but embrace it wholeheartedly, is a wonderful benchmark for it’s development.