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Filed under: Productivity, Web services, Commercial, Freeware, Social Software, Search, Web

TweetBeep - track Twitter mentions via email

TweetBeepIf your job has you tasked with monitoring your company's online presence, you're probably dealing with Twitter in some way. Running occasional manual searches for your company's name is one way to go, but a better way would be to sign up with a service like TweetBeep.

TweetBeep is a free service that will email you as frequently as once per hour with any Twitter mentions of the search terms of your choice. The service is ad-supported, but if you find that you need it, TweetBeep also offers a premium option for $20US/month that allows you to receive updates as frequently as every 15 minutes, up to 200 different alert searches, and no advertising.

While TweetBeep allows you to set a number of criteria for your alerts, one of the most interesting is the ability to set an "Attitude" criteria. You can choose from three:

  • Positive attitude
  • Negative attitude
  • Asking a question

This appears to be a fantastic way to stay on top of how people are perceiving your company or brand, and gives you the ability to very quickly react to your customers or users. It can also be useful for heavy Twitter users to ensure they don't miss any mentions. I should note that as of the time of this writing I had some difficulty with the email confirmation process - it took multiple requests and over an hour before my email confirmation arrived in my inbox.

[via Stay N' Alive]

Filed under: Google, Social Software, Search

Twoogle performs Google and Twitter searches simultaneously

Twoogle
Whether you think Twitter is the greatest thing since egg slicers or you think it's just another dumb way to waste time on the internet, there's one thing that makes Twitter extraordinarily helpful: real-time search. While Google does a pretty good job of letting you find maps of South Dakota, the best place to buy a digital camera, or other the latest news from Washington, Twitter search can help you figure out what people are talking about right now.

For instance, if you wanted to figure out whether you were the only person experiencing a Google outage yesterday, all you had to do was look at Twitter. Or a few weeks ago you could find out exactly what people thought about the new Star Trek movie seconds after the surprise premiere in Austin.

Twoogle is a tool that provides the best of both worlds, but letting you search both Google and Twitter at the same time. Just enter a search term, and Twoogle will provide results in a split-screen format, with Twitter search listings on the left and Google on the right.

The only problem I have with Twoogle is that Google doesn't look great when you squash the window, since you wind up providing roughly equal space to search results and sponsored links. But if you have a higher resolution monitor this shouldn't be a problem. FYI, the screenshot above was made using Google Chrome on a 1280 x 800 pixel display.

Filed under: Internet, Text, Search

Is Twitter's search finally going to become a Google Killer?


In the recent past, "realtime" has become one of the most overused buzzwords around (right up there with "social" and "community"). And nothing realtime has been more talked about than search.twitter.com.

It's been touted as a Google killer, though in it's present state Twitter's search is an entirely different beast. For one thing, it currently only indexes their own content. That, however, is going to change soon.

Santosh Jayaram, former Search Quality VP for Google has joined Twitter as VP of Operations. According to Jayaram, a couple big changes are coming to search that will make it much more of a killer than it is right now.

First, Search is going to start crawling links that appear in tweets. Let's face it - there's not nearly as much important information in someone's 140 character message about a web page as there is on the page itself. Crawling the sources Twitter users are buzzing about will add much needed context to Twitter's index.

Second, a reputation system is going to be created - and it will no doubt take a lot of work to get it right. The goal is to downplay less valuable tweets (like retweets) and emphasize more worthwhile content.

Will these changes make Twitter a real Google killer? Probably not, but it's certainly going to make the tool much more useful and relevant.

[via WebWare]

Filed under: Utilities, Social Software, web 2.0, Web

Twitterfall tracks Twitter trends and more in real time


Twitter Search is great at tracking trends, but you have to refresh your search page manually when new results appear. Twitterfall solves that problem by cascading tweets with popular keywords or your custom search down the page in real time. You can also log into Twitter to put your friends' tweets in the mix, or just view them by themselves.

The customization available in Twitterfall is impressive. Both the appearance and the content can be adjusted, with a couple of different skins and plenty of search options. You can filter out retweets, specify a geographic location to search, and more or less make Twitterfall show you only exactly what you're looking for. You can also tweet, favorite, dm, reply and retweet from it, if you're logged in. This could easily replace the Twitter web interface in some people's bookmarks.

Filed under: Social Software, Search, web 2.0, Web

Twitter starting to integrate search features at last

Twitter Search
It's been more than half a year since Twitter purchased the search engine Summize. And it looks like Twitter is finally starting to integrate search features into the micro-blogging service. You can already search for messages across the public Twitter network in near-real time by visiting search.twitter.com. But soon you'll see a search box and Trends drop down menu on the main page of Twitter.

Right now these features will only show up for a handful of random Twitter users. But if the test is successful, Twitter could roll out the features to additional users soon.

If you don't want your messages to show up in searches, you can click the "Protect my updates" button in your account settings so that only people who you have approved will be able to see your messages.

[via VentureBeat]

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Blogging, E-mail, Web services, Freeware, Social Software

TwitterSearch - find your friends that are using Twitter without inviting them

TwitterSearchSocial networks are certainly popular and useful these days, but if there's one annoyance they've created it would have to be the abundance of unsolicited emails that they produce. Unlike spam, which is unsolicited email for products and services you have nothing to do with, many are referring to the emails generated by social networks and the like as "bac'n". Basically, it's a more legitimate form of unsolicited email because you have some sort of relationship with the host service.

Most of these services grow in large part by finding ways to engineer their users into inviting as many friends as possible. In Twitter's case, the only way to find out if one of your friends is using the service is to send them an invitation. While I'm sure this is quite effective for Twitter, it's also a bit nasty.

If you've been hesitant to spam, sorry, "bac'n" your friends with signup requests for Twitter (a service they may have little or no interest in), you might be happy to learn that some enterprising individuals have generated TwitterSearch. With TwitterSearch you can enter a list of email addresses, and it will return links to each person's Twitter page that it can find.

This is a tool that really ought to be built in to Twitter, and it should be able to link in to your email address book the same way Facebook and other social tools do. In fact, it probably will, sooner or later.

[via Mashable]

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