Businesses using Twitter; there’s something to this idea. Even Twitter itself realizes it, as it’s expected to be a part of its own business model launching soon. In the meantime, other companies continue to jump into the ring. The lastest is American Express, which today unveiled Pulse, a Twitter stream focused on small businesses.

Pulse, which is a part of American Express’ Open Forum site, uses Twitter’s API to display the public tweets from small business owners. This stream can also be broken up into different small business industries, such as auto dealers, cleaning services, restaurants, and many others.

The service also has its own Trending Topics area, and highlights the top shared links on Pulse in the right hand column of the page. And if you click on the “Links” hyperlink near the top of the stream, it will show you all the top links being shared. There is a little star icon next to these to allow you to pick which ones you think should receive higher placement. These are all little nice features.

Front and center on the page is also a way to search for any business you think may be a part of the Pulse stream. And if you’re a small business owner not yet a part of it, you can sign up and nominate your company to be included.

We’ve reached out to ask American Express if there is any kind of financial agreement with Twitter to use these tweets, but it would seem that they’re just using the public API. This is a similar concept to what Federated Media has been doing with ExecTweets, a curated stream of tweets from business executives.

Source: Techcrunch.com