The other day, I took a look at how the Associated Press used Twitter to cover the Sonia Sotomayor hearings.

It was a landmark experiment for that organization, and it seems the most extensive such project, fueled by a team of eight. But live tweets during the hearings weren’t limited to the AP.

Michael Muskal of the Los Angeles Times, Maria Newman and Kate Phillips of the New York Times, and Peter Hamby of CNN all fired away tweets of their own, each with their own style.

Muskal tweeted from his @latimesmuskal account and he wrote me via e-mail about the experience.

“We are trying to explore a way to do what journalism has always done best — explanation, context, voice and personality — in a new forum, Twitter,” he wrote. ”The idea is bring those building blocks of good journalism over to an interactive platform and see if we can tell the Sotomayor story in a different and interesting way while maintaining the usual standards of truth and quality.”

Asked how his style of tweeting differed from the AP’s, he responded, “We too are giving the news, but I think we are trying to be more analytical as well.”

For example, he noted he flagged issues that didn’t come up, pointed out the politics, and showed the irony in Leahy making jokes while Franken had to stick to serious “to establish senator-type creds.”

A glance at the New York Times @thecaucus feed, updated by Newman and Phillips according to a tweet from the Times’ Social Media Editor Jennifer Preston, showed another style of tweeting.

It was almost entirely composed of quotes or paraphrases of what people were saying inside the courtroom. In a sense it told a story and allowed the reader to follow along as if they were there. It also directed people back to The Caucus blog and New York Times Web site to read more and continue the conversation.

Finally, CNN’s Twitter feed @hambypCNN was a hybrid of live tweets, analysis, and interaction with users. Hamby also posted TwitPics and shared commentary throughout the hearings.

So who was the most successful? All of the feeds were valuable in their own way. But as one way to measure (though far from perfect), here’s how many followers each account gained over the span of the coverage (July 13-17), per TwitterCounter:

@AP_Courtside +1,865
@thecaucus +375
@hambypCNN +228
@latimesmuskal +111

The account that showed the most growth was in fact the AP — the one that relied on the audience to predominantly direct coverage and interacted the most. It’s difficult to put a value on tweets, but that in itself is telling of this new age.