The Confidential Resource » Twitter

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.

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.

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.

TweetWhen

Richard McEachin — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 11:00:03 +0000

Dan Zarella (@danzarrella) a Social Media expert who works at HubSpot, has launched a tool for those interested in measuring your most retweetable days & times. It is called TweetWhen.

This could be useful in some investigations involving Twitter.

@LocusCommunis on Twitter

Richard McEachin — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 15:46:13 +0000

You can find me on Twitter as @LocusCommunis. This will include the a lot of links to useful sites that I find as I wade through my daily workload.

Twitter Searching

Richard McEachin — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 19:17:59 +0000

This Twitter thing has become a necessity to the connected. It is also an evolving search problem for Investigators.

Searching Twitter isn’t as straightforward as I would like. Content disappears in a short time in many search facilities and search results differ depending on which search facility you use.

18 Useful Twitter-related Sites

Here are 18 Twitter-related sites that I have found useful:

http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/development/27-twitter-tools-to-help-you-find-and-manage-followers/ (Good selection of tools)
http://www.2lingual.com/2lingual-twitter/ (search Twitter in 2 languages)
http://48ers.com/ (uses a Google App)
http://www.collecta.com/ (Often find pics of genitalia & sex acts on main page – you must sign-up, but good for finding pics- shows real time search results for many social media sites incl. Twitter)
http://foller.me/ (Based on the Twitter API, used to gather Twitter analytics from any profile. It scans your Twitter profile, parses your latest tweets and followers. Tweets are separated into topics, mentions and hashtags. Followers are mapped out on a Google Map.)
http://followerwonk.com/ [Search Twitter bios for a term or user name. Compare associate overlaps for entered users. Use the tabs to toggle between friends (people who they follow) and followers (people who follow them]
http://friendfeed.com/
http://www.google.com/realtime
http://nearbytweets.com/ (shows Tweets by city/location)
http://www.searchtastic.com/ (a word search for Twitter messages)
http://seesmic.com/seesmic_desktop/look/ (social media software)
http://topsy.com/ (indexes and ranks search results based upon the most influential conversations millions of people are having every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain queried.)
http://tweetstalk.com/ (use this to follow someone on Twitter, but you don’t want them to know you’re following them)
http://twiangulate.com/search/ (an interesting tool to find connections between people)
http://www.twitjobsearch.com/ (search for job ads on Twitter)
http://www.twitterpowersearch.com/ (Search Real Time Twitter Trends and Tweets)
http://search.twitter.com/ (The original Twitter Search)
http://suicidemachine.org/ (delete all your social-networking profiles)

How Tweet It Is!

Richard McEachin — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 11:00:09 +0000

The Library of Congress announced they acquired the entire archive of public Twitter activity since its inception in March 2006. Addition of new data to the archive will create a delay of several weeks between its addition and its availability to the public.

Google has also created way to revisit tweets related to historic events called Google Replay. It lets you relive a real time search from specific moments in time, but Google Replay only goes back a few months now, but it will eventually reach back to the very first Tweets.

TweetMeme

Richard McEachin — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:00:56 +0000

TweetMeme is a service which aggregates links on Twitter to determine which links are most popular. TweetMeme categorises these links into Categories, Subcategories and Channels, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what you’re interested in.

We make it easy for you to subscribe to each category and the most popular through their RSS feeds and Twitter accounts.

The thing that interests me most is the search facility that works quite well, especially for finding Tweets that include company names.

Twitter Lists

Richard McEachin — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:00:18 +0000

Twitter lists are becoming an interesting crowd sourcing phenomenon. Twitter Lists is becoming a favorite tool for Twitter. The lists identify specific individuals in vertical fields.

To make a list, sign in to your Twitter account and click on navigation-bar item that reads “New Lists”. A pop-up window asks you to name your new list and if you want it to be public or not. When you make your own list be careful; a public list may reveal too much about what you are interested in.

You should first look for the list you want to create, somebody has probably already created it, but at the moment there isn’t a good way to find lists. Go to Twitter’s people search page and do a search for your list topic and rummage around to find accounts to add to your list. Eventually these lists will be useful once they are easier to find and search.

Listorious has compiled a list of lists of sorts but it isn’t a true search engine. This site and the Twitter people search seem to be the best tools to use when dealing with Twitter Lists.

Bing searching Facebook and Twitter

Richard McEachin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:00:38 +0000

Microsoft to Data-Mine Facebook & Twitter

Microsoft has cut non-exclusive deals with both Facebook and Twitter for Bing.

Microsoft has cut non-exclusive deals with both Facebook and Twitter for Bing to search their real-time data feeds. Google has followed suit at least with Twitter, but Facebook is the prize because it has like 40 million updates a day from its 300 million users. Not all Facebook updates will be searched by Bing, however, only the ones made available to the wider public. Facebook, where Microsoft has an equity stake, will apparently provide users with a numbers of new tools to do so. It is unclear how much Microsoft is paying. The Twitter integration is already in beta. The deals suggest that Twitter, which has raised $155 million in venture capital, will see its first revenue since ads will follow. Terms were not disclosed.

Microsoft’s stake in Facebook may give us some interesting tools for searching Facebook in the near future.