Twitter Search is great. Unfortunately, unlike FriendFeed’s search, it doesn’t update live in real-time. Sure, for some searches, that would be annoying. But it’d be nice to at least have the option to watch a stream of incoming tweets without having to hit the refresh button. And Twitter has just unveiled a way to do that, with a new widget.
The widget, found here, allows you to enter any search query, along with a title and a caption. The widget will then be built next to the input fields so you can see what it looks like. You can also edit its color and dimensions. If you like it, you simply grab the code and put it on a webpage. From there, it will continuously update in real-time with new results from the query you set.
You can even do more advanced searches using parameters like “OR”. In their example widget, Twitter uses the following search string “San Francisco OR @sf OR #sf” to make a live-updating San Francisco Twitter Search widget. And you can also loop old results if you’re doing a search for something that will have a low volume of tweets, so the widget doesn’t appear so static.
There are no shortage of third-parties that do widgets like these, but an official Twitter one will no doubt be useful to many people for events or personal use. It’s not quite the useful “track” functionality that Twitter used to have (which would ping you when a keyword you were searching for was said), but it’s getting closer.
We made one of these real-time widgets for TechCrunch, but the code you get doesn’t appear to work too nicely with WordPress posts, so the picture will have to do for now. This new feature follows Twitter rolling out its “Twitter 101″ guide for businesses to use the service earlier tonight.
interesting feature
yeah true, its time to implement it on our blogs!
Good to see that Twitter is now offering this, but I’m somewhat surprised it took this long. We also offer search widgets (albeit static ones) based on a Twitter search or widgets pulled from one or more Twitter user tweets. You can preview and try it out here:
http://www.blas...ter-widget.aspx
A useful feature is the ability to translate the tweets to create widgets in many languages.
We thought about doing a real-time one, but things like that on a page tend to be distracting to readers–kind of like animated gifs or too much Flash. But I suppose it may work with certain content.
I don’t like most of the Twitter widgets generally. But, this one seems to be a cool one. However, as you say, the code is not working too fast or properly with Wordpress. So, better if we wait for Twitter to polish the widget.
I don’t like most of the Twitter widgets, but this one seems to work fine. thx.
We are totally looking to implement this on our site just as it was launched. Too bad it doesn’t render in Safari, IE7, IE8, or older versions of FireFox. It doesn’t even display exactly as promised on the latest Firefox. I’m amazed that Twitter would release a product that doesn’t even work on any of the major browsers. Oh wait, it’s Twitter we are talking about. What a joke
MG, Thoughts about a “Chirp” feature for Twitter or basically like “Poke” for twitter? It could possibly create more awareness for some users. Set a max allowance per day to eliminate spamming. It eliminates having to write an @ message to that user or unnecessary following.
An interesting thought, though I tend to hate Facebook pokes. But the idea to limit it to a few a day might work okay.
Very good thought. It would be a welcome feature. Why don’t suggest to Twitter? Ah, yes, spam would be a problem. Still, it can be eliminated by setting limits.
More on the story, plus another example, tracking the keyword “Apple.”
http://www.sach...rch-widget.html
Twitter is becoming real life partner as well as business partner I mean tool.This widget add more value to Twitter and bloggers like me and you to optimize our blog with twitter search widget.
Twitter stolen documents are the evidence of all the future plans of twitter.
Doesn’t http://www.tweetizen.com already do this – and better by allowing people to tweet directly from the widget?
This is awesome.
I actually prefer to hit the refresh button, it allows me some time to read.
I just lost 40 followers… Did anyone else spontaneously lose followers tonight?
yeah, not to worry, they’re cleaning out spam accounts again.
Oh no! Life ending!
Interesting. Innovation will kill Twitter. So they better sell now.
Dam retweets kicking comments butt it terms of numbers. Not the same function of course, but how many reply @ are there on those retweets? Interesting.
Beginning of the end for Twitter clients – suckers
Pretty weak. I would have thought they could do better.
You can use HTML in the widget too, check out mine here: http://www.drewolanoff.com and hover #BlameDrewsCancer LIVESTRONG and the email addy.
Why isn’t the widget running in this story? SPAM. Twitter can’t do anything about the enormous amounts of spam in their content.
If TC ran this widget you can bet every single startup would be spamming the shit out of the #techcrunch tag.
I’d be interested in knowing if the installation problem of the widget was on our side, or wordpress.
It’s nice, but ya the CSS conflicts galore.
Huh, what a shame. A friend and I launched http://twitstat.us/ not more than two weeks ago – if we had known this was coming out, we may have done some extra work on it.
Oh well, competition’s fun. Nice widget.
Ryan, please keep up the GREAT work with your widget — unlike Twitter’s own search widget, yours actually doesn’t break IE8!
I’m recommending it to my client as an alternative for visitors using IE7 and IE8 (and maybe IE6 – need to check).
Didnt work for me..
Seems a similar to TweetBlender: http://kirill-n.../tweet-blender/
It broke my hompage code (Code after it did not render) in IE8, but worked in FF, Chrome, Safari.
IE7 is failing to load any site with the widget embedded. Anybody else seeing this?
Example site: http://www.inqu...twitter-widget/
Internet Explorer cannot open the web site… Operation aborted.
Don’t know if I am the only one but any site that has this on it, it bombs out my IE7 but works fine in FF. Would really like to get this on my site but not when this problem keeps happening.
This is cool stuff.
I am going to implement it on my About page
http://www.ades...lu.com/about-me
Well – I see much of the discussion is now on all blogs is around real time search. Another startup Geochirp launched today
Trendsspotting has made some interesting predictions on real time search hype
http://www.tren...om/blog/?p=1372
Not sure if Geochirp is one among those startups who wont be able to live upto the real time search hype.
The widget doesn’t seem to work in Blogger posts. I keep getting the error message that the tag is not allowed in Blogger. I tried pulling out this meta and sticking it in the of my Blogger template; the error went away but the widget still did not display in my post. I don’t get it.
does not work in Blogger for me and I tried many times
OK, I got it working in Blogger, however, it does not work correctly and not in the widget I created. It is a floater.
this is the code I used to get it to work in Blogger somewhat
new TWTR.Widget({
search: ‘BlogHer 09′,
id: ‘twtr-search-widget’,
loop: true,
title: ”,
subject: ‘Live Twitter’,
width: 250,
height: 300,
theme: {
shell: {
background: ‘#9e1818′,
color: ‘#1f0907′
},
tweets: {
background: ‘#ffcca3′,
color: ‘#0d070d’,
links: ‘#9e1818′
}
}
}).render().start();
Honestly, there may be a little bit of a business model with this widget. Twitter could use the entered search terms for the widget as keywords for advertising, which would allow them to target ads. They could then intersperse (not too frequently) ads in between some of the tweets. I would think that the search terms for the widget entered would be chosen based on what the site was about so twitter might be able to use this in an adsense model. Just a thought.
Any page with this widget in it is crashing with ‘Operation aborted’ in internet explorer for me as well. Seems like quite a major bug for them to still have not fixed yet..
When the search widget is within a HTML table, that seems to cause the operation aborted message in internet explorer for me.
Unfortunately I’m working within a framework where is must live inside a table.
Appears to be fixed now.
I like very much the writings and pictures and explanations in your adress so I look forward to see your next writings.
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I think I found a solution for the IE’s Operation Aborted 927917.
It’s kind simple.
Grab the code for your Twitter Search Widget. Put this code where you want to show your widget.
The rest of code, the javascript code, you put right before tag in your html page.
It will work
Cheers