People who use Twitter for business purposes should soon get access to a valuable flow of information.  A Twitter employee indicated this week that Twitter is going to release a real-time analytics dashboard sometime in the fourth quarter of this year.

An important – and surprising – point: the product will be free.  Which is great news for business owners and marketers, if a little odd since this would be an easy way for Twitter to earn money.

Otherwise, Justin Kistner reported after speaking to business development specialist Ross Hoffman at the Sports Marketing 2.0 Summit, "Like their releases of ads and the new UI, this will likely start as a beta release and have a phased roll out.  Because the conference was a sports marketing conference, Ross said it would be available to that audience, but presumably it will be available to all users."

Also, "The product will leverage algorithms similar to the Twitter Resonance concept in order to show users which tweets are spreading, who is influential in their network, and more.  The emphasis is on real time in order to help users make adjustments on the fly to their tactics."

This development could cause professionals to start spending a lot more time on Twitter, and maybe help the site gain additional fans.

Let’s just hope Twitter is able to remain in working order if a lot more information starts flying around, considering that there have been 12 posts on the Twitter Status blog in the last month alone.