It would be hard to imagine your API being simultaneously simple enough to be less work using Twitter's API manually, and customizable enough to dump out exactly what I want easier than massaging the data and presenting it myself.
But then if I was a guy in a band setting up our website, I could see this being really useful.
To somebody just using Tweets (keep in mind that we currently also pull from Amazon, YouTube, Blogs, Blog comments and any RSS/Atom feed), we provide an extra safety net with our moderation. If you just incorporate the Twitter api directly on your site, you have to accept whatever users say showing up. With our moderation in between, you run no risk of the random or ugly comments showing up on your site.
Also, if you do to use more than just Tweets, our API returns normalized data so you have a consistent and reliable set of fields no matter the source.
I found it strange that you don't pull from blogs themselves. We have our own "what people are saying about our thing" page, and it's entirely populated with blog content.
If TechCrunch wrote up my app, it seems the only way I'd know about it from your service would be if somebody mentioned the app name in the comments.
We search both blog content and blog comments, so if a TechCrunch article or TechCrunch comment mentions you, there is a good chance it will show up in the dashboard. Given the volume of tweets versus blog comments versus blog content, the blog content is usually more buried and has to be filtered out with the radio buttons provided when browsing a Stream.
Admittedly, we are not running our own crawlers right now, so it's hard for us to direct searching at older content or specific sites/blogs. We currently use Backtype (http://www.backtype.com) and ContextVoice (http://www.contextvoice.com) for finding blog comments and blog content respectively.
Our end goal is to find and rank social media content in real time. If somebody as prominent as TechCrunch mentions you, we would like you to know immediately and have that piece of content displayed, noticeable and ready for your approval in our dashboard within minutes.
We are not there yet and it sucks when we completely miss important mentions, but I promise we are working our damnedest to get better.
It would be hard to imagine your API being simultaneously simple enough to be less work using Twitter's API manually, and customizable enough to dump out exactly what I want easier than massaging the data and presenting it myself.
But then if I was a guy in a band setting up our website, I could see this being really useful.