I can certainly understand people’s reluctance to join Twitter, and I still have a lot of ambivalence about joining a couple of days ago.

There are two sites, though, that I began periodically visiting a few weeks ago that easily generated some Twitter benefits without joining — OneRiot and MicroPlaza.

Both of these sites are search engines and have some elements in common with other tools on Not “The Best,” But “A List” Of Search Engines For Social Media.

The key difference, however, between these two and others are that once you type in your query, the results just show links to websites that have been recommended on Twitter — not all the back-and-forth conversations that are happening around the topic.  MicroPlaza also actually shows screenshots.

I think they are both worth a visit now and then whether you are on Twitter or not.  I’ve also added them both to The Best… list I mentioned.