Twitter Search is great, but you have to be on Twitter’s site or one of the third-party apps to use it. This requires an active approach; you must enter terms and load or reload the results to get what you want. That’s why Twitter’s old “track” feature was so great, it would ping you every time a keyword you were searching for came up. Unfortunately, as growth exploded, Twitter had to axe the feature. But third parties have slowly been bringing it back. And a new one offers a pretty nice way of doing it.
Exclaim Track is a very simple service. It’s Twitter track over IM. Right now, it works with Google Talk (via Jabber), and all you have to do is follow exclaimtrack@appspot.com. Once that name is on your contact list, simply IM it with “track <keyword>” and it will IM you all Twitter mentions of the term you put in.
But here’s why Exclaim Track is really great: It’s so simple to both track and un-track items. For example, today is the Michigan/Notre Dame football game. I can’t watch it because I’m stuck at the office doing work for TechCrunch50 (hope to see you there Monday and Tuesday). I want to know what people are saying about the game, but don’t want to keep reloading Twitter Search, so instead I set up an Exclaim Track query, and now I’m getting pinged every time something comes up. After the game is over, I won’t care about the search anymore, so I simply type “remove <keyword>” and it’s gone.
You can also easily turn notifications on or off simply by IMing “on” or “off” to the Exlcaim Track IM account. That’s great if you want to mute notifications, but don’t necessarily want to remove a term. Also, you can search multiple terms at the same time, so removing all of them to quite the service might be a pain, without the “off” command.
Exclaim Track is a part of Excla.im, a service which allows you to update your Twitter status via IM. The developer, Harper Reed, set up this new tracking feature using the Pubsubhubbub real-time pinging service and Superfeedr, which does real-time feed parsing. He simply used Google’s App Engine for the messaging and hosting aspects, so the service actually costs him nothing to run.
One small downside to Exclaim Track is that when you first start tracking a keyword, it will find most of the recent mentions of the term that are available in Twitter Search. This means you’ll get a punch of non-real-time information. But once this runs through (usually just seconds or minutes), you’ll start to see new results pop-up in near real time. “Near” is an important thing to note, it’s not quite real time, but it’s usually pretty close, usually under a minute of the mention on Twitter.
would have been cool for the throwback to the telegraph reporting (really!) of ND’s rose bowl (!) win over Stanford. 1925, Rockne coaching over… “pop” warner for stanford… yes that pop warner. not as freky as the faux tweets yesterday reenacting 9/11 imo
Its nice and great to hear about Twitter!Twitter search has developed to a great extent. But Twitter’s old “track” feature was so great though the third party apps brought them back with their vast searching.
The fact that we can easily turn notifications on or off simply by IMing “on” or “off” to the Exlcaim Track IM account is a good attempt. But they can improve to make this ExclaimTrack a real time one!
Dustin ( @dlsspy ) has had TwitterSPY up and running for over a year now … http://dustin.g...com/twitterspy/ — can you do a comparison MG?
ok i tried it out… just about no features…
here’s the feature list for TwitterSPY:
autopost Enable or disable autopost.
block Block a user.
follow Begin following a user.
help You need help.
leave Stop following a user.
mood Ask about twitterspy’s mood.
mood_detail Detailed mood info.
off Disable tracks.
on Enable tracks.
post Post a message to twitter.
search Perform a search query (but do not track).
status Check your status.
top10 Get the top10 most common tracks.
track Start tracking a topic.
tracks List the topics you’re tracking.
twlogin Set your twitter username and password (use at your own risk)
twlogout Discard your twitter credentials.
unblock Unblock a user.
untrack Stop tracking a topic.
uptime Ask about twitterspy’s uptime.
watch_friends Enable or disable watching friends.
whois Find out who a user is.
This will make Steve happy
Doesn’t everyone use twitterspy for this already?
Its nice and great for info on your blog.I just already start to use twitter,i need to learning about twitter more.
Exclaim Track! Viewing tweets related to a single topic is quite simpler through Exclaim Track. Information alerts would help to follow the real time discussions and track down the most updated tweets within seconds.
Though finding most of the recent mentions of the term that are available in Twitter Search maybe an annoyance sometimes, it will also be a feature to get know all the recent trends related to that query word.
Definitely a cool and lazy way to monitor your brand. But I found it to be too much when testing with pop culture keywords.
Also fyi to dev I typed remove keyword and it confirmed, but kept sending me mentions of that keyword after two removal attempts.
Nice Job Harper!
Smart idea to use IM as a vehicle for Twitter trends. The narrowcast approach is suited for real-time news, and made more powerful when contextual, personalized, and integrated with applications that people already use (e.g. IM clients, web browsers)>
The add-on from MashLogic also lets you passively consume Twitter, on demand. Trending topics are highlighted on every web page, and you can mouse-over them to see the most recent tweets, retweet without leaving the page, and flip through user profiles.
Julien, from Superfeedr here. Yes, this is near-”instantaneous”… but it is real-time : real-time means there is a time constraint. With Superfeedr, this constraint is that you’ll get a mention of the notification within at most 15 minutes. On average, we have a detection time of less than 3 minutes. We’re working hard to improve that even further to make it not only real-time, but also instantaneous
Ho, and BTW, we have a Crunchbase page : http://www.crun...pany/superfeedr
I do too!
http://www.crun...son/harper-reed
You lie !!
Notify.me does this pretty well too. They offer a ton of other ways to receive updates as well.
Cool stuff though.
This hack is no where near as comprehensive as twitterspy, nor as thorough as notify.me. It is also mostly a hack and as near beta as an application can be.
what i think is cool about the exclaimtrack bot is that it cost me nothing to host (unless it blows up) and is relatively real time. Julien from Superfeedr does all the hard work. All the bot does is push updates to people. It does it rather well.
if you had troubles earlier today – you should be better now. feel free to ping me and let me know how it works.
awesome
Its nice and great for info on your blog.I just already start to use twitter,i need to learning about twitter more…..and i integrated my blog with twitter for sending last posts realy nice.
I guess I’m old school but I like http://www.tweetalarm.com — simple service that emails you when someone tweets about your company or any keywords you put in (like google alerts for twitter)…saves me from spending an hour a day on twitter search seeing what people are saying about our products
Snooze. Twitterspy does this already.
it did not work for me. has it blown up already? Or did I do it wrong some way.
Well done, guys.
You can also have a look at Tweet.IM. User base is growing extremely fast.