We just got word from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey that the company will be launching a real time search feature “very soon.” Type in a keyword or keywords and any time a Twitter is created that includes those keywords, you’ll be notified via IM or SMS. They’ll add the the ability to access this via their API in the near future, Dorsey says.
The feature hasn’t launched yet, and we’re unsure on some of the details. For example, I’m not sure if you can limit results to just people you are tracking, or if you can get results via RSS or email instead of or in addition to SMS and IM. Either way, Twitter is clearly adding features and functionality at a quick pace, which is good to see. Hopefully, the worst of the downtime is behind us, too.
The fuzzy image to the right is a sample user interface that we received from Twitter.
Update: Dorsey says in the next couple of weeks they’ll allow historical search as well. Also, for now, searches can only be done on all Twitter users. Over time, users will be able to refine searches by friends, geography, time and/or language. For now, results are only returned via SMS and IM - RSS, email and the API will come later.
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Nice! This could make Twitter my new Breaking News site.
They sent you a mobile phone? They didn’t send me one. Maybe they got my address wrong…
Nice, BUT, you can already do this using MSN search just type: /forward/SMS/ole223/p+n.
If it doesn’t work the first time just keep changing up some of the chatacters until it does!
Simple.
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Heh, I wonder what PubSub people are thinking now…. What Twitter calls “real time search” PubSub called “prospective search”.
Heh, I wonder when Fake Steve Ballmer and other are going to stop pointlessly spamming this blog.
I thought that Twitter had received enough funding to pay for a phone from this century….
Woohooo! Exciting news!
In the meantime you can do historical searches covering the last month of twitters here: http://terraminds.com/twitter/ This is a third party tool that utilises the Twitter API.
sesh - funny…about the phone comment. I think I have one of those in a drawer somewhere.
sesh they also need to get a camera with auto focus too!
Interesting enough after looking over the ‘how to make twitter useful’ paper from TechDirt. Obviously this will allow companies to track mentions of their product name. The next part might sound odd but bear with me; this is the kind of thing twitter should charge from on a corporate basis. Allow companies to take up a contract and follow their ‘campaigns’ in real time from twitterers. It would also increase traffic to twitter- those companies want their consumers to go on twitter so that they can have more accurate results. It’s win-win isn’t it?
I’d be quite happy if the Twitter guys would leave search up to the people from Terraminds. Their support is excellent and I know they’ve got some very cool stuff up their sleeves. I’m told the Twitter API has limitations which cause these engines to lose a tweet here and there. If Twitter would resolve these issues, for example by providing direct access to their indexes, then it could truly become a very useful resource for hot-of-the-press opinions, impressions, pointers and headlines. I’m already integrating Twitter search results in most of my news radars.
Instead, Twitter could implement functions like this:
- who’s following me that I’m not following?
- create a unique URL for the Replies tab RSS feed so that I can track it where I want
- facilitate browsing the tweet history log of the last 24 hours, preferably with at least 50 messages on one screen, and in regular chronological order
- easier navigation of people’s lists of friends. Index the pages and let me jump straight to the page that start with the letter S, for example. Make these lists searchable, so that I can more easily answer the question if person X is following person Y.
“…phone from this century…”
What?? A simple device with just calls and sms is not from this century??? (psss: people call these things “normal” phones, not i/smart/e/-phones and they are known to be useful).
CitizenT: The poster probably meant a phone from the 21st Century, as in after 2000. That phone looks like it’s from the late 1990s.
that’s a shitty phone…check out project kannel on freashmeat.net
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
There seems to be a slight disagreement between the URL and the title of this post. I’m sure Twitter search is going to be of special interest to trend watchers and marketeers (and egosurfers), but from the sound of things this could probably be used to provide functionality akin to channels.