This is likely the largest collection of statistic accounts Twitter has ever seen. They’re covering the NFL, NBA, NCAA Basketball, and NCAA Football. There are hundreds of these accounts. The one thing they have in common is that they’re all powered by StatTweets.

Here’s the full list of accounts managed by StatTweets. The stats these accounts spit out are driven by StatSheet and is part of a larger campaign to spread sports news (beyond final scores) to the world. This is the dream service for hardcore sports fans and stats junkies. We’ll proactively apologize for clogging the timelines of anyone who loves this service a little too much. StatTweets makes ScoreBots look lame.

The best part of StatTweets is that it lets you key in on a single team. If you like the Celtics, you can follow just Celtics stats instead of stats for all NBA teams. You can also interact with any of the accounts by sending it an @reply with the hashtag “#statme” as the message and it’ll spit some stats back to you (view all uses). For the football games, the accounts will send out an update anytime the score changes with the new score and how much time remains, which is perfect for those people who can’t watch the game or watch the gamecast on a sports site.

Here’s a fun application built on the Twitter API and based on Twitter itself - Twitter Magnets. The concept is simple, you have 120 characters to create a poem that you can send to anyone. You get a randomized set of tiles at the start, but you can switch out your remaining tiles for new ones at any time to get new words. I chose to make a haiku below and submitted it to @twittermagnets.

If you’re interested in seeing what other people come up with, follow @twittermagnets and poems published will come up in their stream.

Here’s a new site called DingItsUp.com, which alerts you via text message, email, or Twitter reply when a site’s status changes from up to down (or vice versa). It looks pretty similar to another site called NotifyMeWhenItsUp.com but takes the alert options further than just email. To try it out, add your site to DingItsUp.com and throw in your Twitter handle. Ideally, you’ll never get “dinged”, but hopefully you will when it actually goes down.

Accounts to follow:

@dingitsup

It’s the time of year when users flock to online marketplaces to purchase their holiday goods. If you’re at all like me, you obsessively check your tracking numbers to see where they are and the latest skinny on their status. However, there’s already an even more obsessive tool (that’s not an insult) called TrackThis that does all that work for you.

Short of telepathy, the service could not be easier to use. Start following @trackthis; they’ll follow you back. Then, send a direct message to @trackthis with the tracking number and a description of your package.

When the status of the package is updated, you’ll receive a direct message back showing you what’s going on.

If you’ve got your SMS notifications set to alert on when you receive a DM, you’ll get that to your phone.

The only thing I can think of that would be nice to have is a link to the tracking page for that number, but UPS makes you check some boxes and whatnot that might prevent that from happening. All in all, a wonderful service to have on your side this holiday season.

Update #1 (12/11/2008): Expected delivery dates are now shown for UPS/FedEx packages

Twittercal won a Mashup of the Day award back in February by connecting your Twitter account with your Google Calendar. This connection allows you to add events to your calendar simply by sending a direct message.

The process is pretty simple. All you need is a Twitter account and a Google Calendar. Head to twittercal.com and fill in a few boxes. Once you request authorization, you’ll be forwarded over to Google where you need to grant it access. After that, you’re free to start adding events.

To add events, simply send a direct message to @gcal giving the details of the event. Google Calendar is pretty good about interpreting human language, so you can send it readable messages. Here are a few examples:

d gcal metting with paul tomorrow at 7pm

d gcal meeting with fred on monday, 25th of june at 9am

Within minutes, you should see your event added to your calendar. Be sure to check out the FAQ or leave a comment here if you have any questions.

Thanks to Lindsay Rees (@lindsayrees) for the tip on this great little app.

Accounts to Follow:

@gcal, @twittercal; @fbrunel, @yowtrip, @kaikini (developers)

I first discovered Twitter mashup ToAnswer through a post on TechCrunch earlier this month. Since its launch, users have been sending feedback to its lone developer Chris Harmston and in a recent visit the site shows a great deal of re-tooling.

The service itself provides users with a better way to ask questions on twitter. Twitter has long been called a crowdsourcing tool but this has always been constrained by the number of followers you have. ToAnswer works to solve this problem by allowing users to send a question to @toask and then allowing anyone to respond to that question from the site in a tweet to @toanswer.

When the service first launched there was a great deal of functionality missing and I had serious concerns about the site’s scalability. However, with recent changes, I think this mashup deserves a revisit and I look forward to seeing more updates to the site.