Twitter users love to gripe that it's too hard to track a topic of conversation as it spreads across the service. Being able to keep up with an interesting piece of news depends on finding the right people to follow, and that's not always easy with the limited search tools Twitter provides. Twemes (it stands for Twitter plus memes) is a site that aims to solve that problem by grouping Twitter tweets according to topic.

Twemes searches Twitter for hashtags, key words marked with the # sign that let you know what each tweet is all about. For example, when you tell everyone on Twitter about how much you enjoyed this post, you can mention #downloadsquad and Twemes will find your tweet, categorize it, and add it to an RSS feed of related tweets. You can find topics on Twemes either by searching or by clicking on words in the tag cloud, which works as an interesting visual display of what Twitter is talking about.

If the idea of hashtags catches on, Twemes could become a useful part of the Twitter experience. Anyone using Twitter's built-in tracking to watch interesting terms via phone or IM already knows how convenient it would be to take those alerts out of your stream and read them on the side. Even though hashtags are used by a fairly small number of Twitterers, they're already a reliable way to follow conversations about the most important events in the global community right now. If you need proof, just check out the feed for Cloverfield.

[Via Mashable]