Tweetag: Tag-Based Search For Twitter

Erick recently wrote:

We all know how tagging makes the Web a richer place (by tapping into people’s desire to categorize things and share those categories, ad-hoc though they may be, with everyone else). Tagging brings a bottoms-up order to the Web by making information more searchable and thus easier to find. Now it is time to start tagging the world. The real world.

Enter Tweetag, a brand new way to search Twitter, or ‘browse the Twittosphere’ as they put it. The app, like most Twitter-related applications, is fairly simple: you enter a tag, and Tweetag will show public Twitter messages that contain that particular keyword, but more interestingly also a list of other tags that are related to it.

This allows you to filter down Twitter’s constant stream of 140-or-less-character messages intuitively. Take for instance a query for ‘obama‘: you’ll see all tweets contain the President-elect’s first name, and you can simply filter it down by adding other keywords to the URL or clicking an associated tag, e.g. ‘obama/youtube‘. In addition, Tweetag features tabs which allow you to filter down Twitter messages containing links, questions and @replies.

The Tweetag homepage also displays the 40 most frequent tags, so you can easily get an idea of what’s hot on Twitter in a way similar to what Twitscoop, TwitBuzz, TweetWire and other services are all about. It’s also a great way to track conversations around a given topic, say the earthquake in Indonesia from last weekend.

Twitter recently acquired Summize, whose technology currently powers Twitter Search, and it wouldn’t take them all that much time and effort to build something similar on top of it. Until they do, you can use Tweetag to monitor specific keywords and find out what’s hot on the popular micro-sharing tool in just a few seconds. Tweetag even boasts their own API which allows you to integrate their results into a blog widget or third-party applications.

At first glance, Tweetag is merely a feature, not a business. The creators insist however that have a way to monetize the service as a B2B tool, and that they are currently raising funding to make that happen.

By the way, if you’re not into Twitter, check out this WordPress plugin the guys behind Tweetag have created for tag-based filtering of comments: Commentag.