Tweetag is a search engine for “tweets” that allows you to look for trends on Twitter and helps you find Tweet discussions that matter to you.
According to the FAQ, “Tweetag analyses more than 200k tweets per day. For each tweet, we do a little magic to automatically tag the tweet real-time. As all tweets are now tagged, we can generate nested tagclouds which offer a great new way of browsing through the sea of tweets.”
For popular topics just add the topic to the URL as in http://tweetag.com/obama/.
Just tried Tweetag and it is a complete waste of time. I searched on tags and topics that I know have been discussed over the last couple of days and it only picked up about 1 in 20 of the tweets. Some topics/tags are not picked up at all probably because they don’t have enough traffic.
I’m sticking to http://search.twitter.com/
Regards
Karen
Karen, like you, I find Tweetag misses a lot of stuff that I find elsewhere. I will revisit this in a month or two to see if it improves.
The poor results we are seeing may be a result of processing time.
Rick
Thanks for the post.
Actually, we just upgraded our servers and we now automatically tag 800k tweets per day!
Hi Karen and Richard.
We work hard on improving our performances. We come from 200 tweets tagged per minute to 600 now.
The thing is that we do some natural language processing to automatically tag and aggregate tweets and it requires some hard processing.
Now we are at the limit of the Twitter partner API which only delivers 600 tweets per minute (they talk about their coming “firehorse” which would deliver the full stream but we are still waiting)
This being said, if you look for a specific tweet, you should better use search.twitter.com. Tweetag takes another approach: browsing, discovering, exploring the Twittosphere.
What are the most discussed topics in general AND related to any topic?
For example: what are the most discussed topics about Obama? Going on http://tweetag.com/obama shows that “Canada” is a hot topic now, information hardly discoverable on search.twitter.com.
And for doing that, statistically speaking we don’t need to process all tweets. We just need to have a representative sample.
Nevertheless, we are still working hard to make it always better
And as you say: Rome hasn’t been made in one day
Nice tool but the information that comes up is heavily influenced by the echo effect’ and not in particular valuable of useful unless you’re a sociologist who wants to track current social processes. Data streams on twitter are noting more than the thoughts of some people without any validation, value or whatesover.