Twitter

UPDATE: Either I was smoking crack when I wrote this or these guys have changed their domain. Since I’m too cheap to afford a nasty habit like that it must be the other so, here is the link to TweetScan that works. I’ll go ahead and update the links in the post from twitterscan.com (which does show a listing in the WayBack Machines archives) to tweetscan.com.

Today’s Microtween is on TweetScan.com. TweetScan lets you research Twitter posts using keyword searches. You can research just a particular keyword, like “Obama”, or you can search for keywords by user. This is extremely helpful if you want to see what people are saying about a particular subject or if you want to track what a person is saying on a specific topic.

Depending on your keywords you can pull back some interesting results. For example if you put in the search phrase “darren rowse” you can see all the things that are said about him. Run that through some more analysis and you might find a trend.

TwitterScan even provides an RSS option so you can subscribe to a Twitter search result. Personally I think that is genius because it invites others to use the site like a service, which should promote usage and build value.

They also provide a search engine plugin that lets you put the TweetScan search in your toolbar. This is handy if you switch between the various search engines like I do. UPDATE: I’m not sure this is available anymore. I don’t see it listed on their site. Maybe it’s just not obvious anymore. I haven’t added it back to my Firefox since I move to using a Mac so I can’t tell you if it works or not. Just FYI.

Perspective:

Twitter is growing exponentially and like all social networking tools it is still maturing. How to effectively use Twitter is still undefined for some and clearly defined for others. One thing is clear though, because conversations on Twitter are public and searchable, there will continue to be growing interest in search, indexing, analyzing and reporting on what is said on Twitter. There is definitely some potential market gold in the data and in the next few Microtweens you and I will look at the tools that will help us dig into that data.

Twitter Scanning,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com