Saturday, February 14, 2009

Searching the Twitterverse

Since I very rarely visit the official browser-based Twitter site, finding it better for my workflow to run a computer-based client called twhirl, I had forgotten about the search tools available on the official Twitter site.

One of my concerns about Twitter is the amount of information that seems to be non-permanent. My Twitter feed is constantly flowing with all types of great information from my ed-tech PLN, and there are times that I want to get back to something from a month ago. (In addition, I also would like to see what the rest of the world is tweeting about, too!)

Twitter has a robust advanced search page which I recommend you try out.

As you can see from the screenshot below, it is easy to limit or broaden your search by filling in multiple pieces of information.

Twitter advanced search screenshot










Screenshot courtesy of twitter.com, 2/14/09


In addition to the advanced search page, Twitter also offers a handy list of operators you can use right from the simple search box to conduct a search.

Once you conduct a search, you can easily choose to add the RSS feed for that search to your newsreader (Bloglines, Netvibes, Google Reader, etc.) to follow that person, topic, or even just be notified when a word that you are interested in is included in a tweet.


Twitter search opearators







Screenshot courtesy of twitter.com, 2/14/09


Take some time to conduct complex searches using the Twitter advanced search page or conduct a search and aggregate it for "watching". At least you are guaranteed each entry is short and quick to read!