Venerable British newspaper The Financial Times (Twitter: financialtimes) is on Twitter.

They've covered the Twitter hype last spring, and are one of the first traditional media outlets to really "get it".

And the Financial Times page on Twitter is even in their trademark salmon-pink. How cool!

Prolific blogger, and former Microsoftie, Robert Scoble (Twitter: scobleizer) has an article in Fast Company, in which he calls Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce "the next email".

Given what it and other companies spend acquiring new customers, there's an untapped gold mine in Twitter and Facebook because we're volunteering so much information about what we're doing right now, whether it's working on a project or eating a chicken-salad sandwich. Learning how to tap it correctly--both to sell to me directly and in seeing major trends in the millions of daily public posts--will be the next major challenge for these companies.

If we revisit this conversation again in three years, I suspect that we'll have found all sorts of little uses for these services, and they'll simply become what email is today: something we must do just to participate in the heartbeat of business.

Scoble is not just pontificating either; he is an avid Twitter user, with over 3,000 updates.