The popularity of the Twitter Service has created a lot of chatters, chatters that are
1. Less than 140 characters long,
2. Very easy to publish anytime, anywhere, ANY PLATFORM
3. Mostly rubbish about what people had for lunch!
However, similarly to what happened to the evolution of blogs, more reputable (and knowledgeable!) people and companies are starting to use twitter as a mean of communicating, branding and marketing mechanism. As a result, there are actual quite a lot useful information in the tweets that people produce today.
Now in order to leverage these information you can follow people’ tweets all day, or you can search people’s tweet, for me, searching is a better use of my time and that’s when a number of the new conversational search service comes in handy.
Twitter search allows to search for what about what is happening now and what people are talking about now. The results are gathered from people’s tweet now or in the last hour or so and hence the other name given to this type of search “Realtime Search”
Whilst you are mostly searching through people’s chatters which are not exactly high quality content, it does have some interesting and useful applications. Firstly, since it is much easier to twitter than to setup a blog site and provide good blog content, you will see contents you normally don’t see in blogs from people who don’t really know how to blog. What good is this search and what useful information can you find? I can think of at least 4 applications:
1. Verify whether some web service is down: There has been numerous time when I am having issues with Gmail and I wasn’t sure whether it was Gmail or something wired with my wireless/network/firewall/ISP, a quick search on twitter will easily reveal whether 3 millions other web users are complaining about the same thing.
2. Product Release: Twitter now is often the first place you hear about new product releases.
3. Search for discount coupons: This one I am keen to try out one day.
4. The very latest gossips about _ _ _: Now this could be a celebrity, politician or anything you have a interested about and can not wait for the bloggers to catch up.
I’d like to think of Twitter search as “a box of chocolates, and you never know what you gonna get!” hence the best way to find out its value and effectiveness is to just try it out.
If you use Firefox You can even integrate Twitter Search Results right into your normal Google Search Results by following these tips from the good folks at Lifehacker.
I am now so excited about what I will find in Twitter every time I do a Google Search!
Since Twitter is not the only realtime microblogging service, we are also starting to see the emergence of meta search engine or search aggregation site that allow you to search across these micro blogging sites such as Twitter and Friendfeed. One such site is Whostalkin.
I personally think this is one of the most exciting search development since the Googzilla has taken control of our search experience, watch out for this space!
I am also pretty sure there are lot of other interesting applications of conversational/realtime searching, so let us know what you think!
UPDATE: Just came across this fantastic post by Chris Allison on how to get the most out of your Twitter search with tips on how to use the advanced search features!
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