The Confidential Resource » Social Sites

Local News on Twitter

Richard McEachin — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 16:26:52 +0000

If you provide a location in your Twitter profile settings, then following @topix_local will get you tweets about the location. To stop getting alerts, simply stop following @topix_local. This needs a city name in your profile settings to be effective so that it picks-up the hashtag (#city).

UPDATE: You won’t get very many Tweets using @topix_local compared to using TweetDeck and creating a column for #City. But of course, in TweetDeck, you will get everything with the city hashtag, whether it’s news or not.

123people Social Media Search Engine

Richard McEachin — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 12:00:24 +0000

I have been using 123people to uncover an individual’s social media presence. It isn’t the only search engine I use for this, but and have found it to be a sound performer.

Where has Google Gone?

Richard McEachin — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 11:00:43 +0000

Google Realtime Search Goes Missing;

The Google Wonder Wheel Is Gone;

Google Squared and News Timeline disappear;

and the removal of the Google News Archive search page are a mystery.

Hide From Social Site Tracking

Richard McEachin — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 11:00:58 +0000

Buttons like these allow Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and others to track your online browsing activities on every site that includes one of these buttons, even if you never click the buttons and (in some browsers) even if you have third-party cookies disabled?

[example images of buttons only -- these buttons are not clickable]

ShareMeNot is a Firefox add-on designed to prevent third-party buttons (such as the Facebook “Like” button or the Twitter “tweet” button) embedded by sites across the Internet from tracking you until you actually click on them. Unlike traditional solutions, ShareMeNot does this without completely removing the buttons from the web experience.

Getting to Know the Neighbourhood — SocialMention

Richard McEachin — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 11:00:01 +0000

SocialMention allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real time. SocialMention monitors over 100 social media sites. I have written about SocialMention before here, here, and here. It is an old favorite.

We use the search plugin that permits searching SocialMention from within the browser’s search. Once we have a search statement that provides useful results, we subscribe to the RSS feed for that search to monitor the changes in the results.

Getting to Know the Neighbourhood — Searching Google Buzz

Richard McEachin — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 11:00:27 +0000

Google Buzz API Search

Any information you see below is visible to anyone on the Internet through normal use of the Google Buzz API. Websites or applications that you authorize might see more. Search using this API at http://zesty.ca/buzz/.

Getting to Know the Neighbourhood — Searching Facebook

Richard McEachin — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 11:00:40 +0000

Facebook Graph API Search

You may search publicly available information on Facebook via their Graph API at http://zesty.ca/facebook/. The Graph API provides access to Facebook objects like people, photos, events etc. and the connections between them like friends, tags, shared content etc. via a uniform and consistent Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) to access the representation. Every object can be accessed using the the URL https://graph.facebook.com/ID, where ID stands for the unique ID for the object in the social graph.

Getting to Know the Neighbourhood – Tracking Discussions

Richard McEachin — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:00:43 +0000

User-generated discussions (other than Twitter) are typically not indexed by major search engines, as they are not on static pages.

Samepoint is a search engine for conversations and discussions on blogs and social media sites. It converts these discussions into web pages, or permalinks, and organizes them within a tag cloud. Enter your search query and subscribe to the RSS feed.

BoardTracker covers over 2.4 million live message boards and discussion groups. Google searches message boards as well, but this gives better results in my experience. Run your search query and subscribe to the RSS feed for your search. To use this search engine properly you do need to sign-up, but it is worth it.

Blippy

Richard McEachin — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 11:00:58 +0000

Blippy allows its users to connect their bank accounts and credit cards to Blippy “to automatically or manually post your purchases so that your followers may view them.” It also syncs existing e-commerce accounts to Blippy such as iTunes, Netflix, Woot, eBay and more. Blippy will then ‘tweet’ each purchase, where it was purchased, and the cost. Many of the pictures have imbedded geolocation metadata.

Getting to Know the Neighbourhood – Tracking Tweets

Richard McEachin — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 16:42:08 +0000

Google, Bing, & Twitter

Google and Bing Social have indexed tweets since 2009. You may also install greasemonkey and a script to put Twitter results on your Google search results page.

Twitter & RSS

Go to Twitter Search, run a search query, click the “Feed for this query” link next to the orange RSS button, and paste the URL into Google Reader. All tweets for your search will be stored for you.

The “Advanced Search” allows you to set more specific parameters for your search. You can even specify whether you want to see positive or negative tweets, or tweets that ask a question.