Teach42

I discovered Tweet Scan yesterday, which at first glance looks like yet another Twitter search engine. To be honest, I’ve been pretty disappointed with most Twitter searches, namely because they don’t go back far enough, take too long or just give wonky results. Consequently, I had pretty low expectations for Tweet Scan. I was pleasantly surprised.

The basic search already deviates from expectations right from the get go. Instead of just being able to do a basic search, it allows you to filter that search to a specific username. So, you can scan just your tweets, or the tweets from a friend. I’m still waiting for someone to add in a third option, ’scan the people I follow’, a search that will filter the results based on tweets by the people that you’ve chosen to follow, which for the most part are the only tweets you see! The search seems to be accurate, very readable, and has links to scan back farther. I did a search for FETC and was able to pull out results as far back as mid December. Not bad, not bad… The results also come with a “Tweet this” link, a permalink to that search and an RSS feed as well.

The site could use some UI help, but if you go into settings you’ll see five customizable fields. By putting in keywords there you can set it up to do some automated searches for you. For example, you could have it automatically pull out references to your name. For example, sometimes people might type “@stevedembo” instead of “@teach42″. Problem being, the former won’t pull up under replies. You could also search for things like, “digital storytelling” to see a report of every tweet with that keyword. And so on. You can set it to email you the results daily, weekly, or even drag the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar. Every time you click it, it rotates through your saved searches. Slick!

This really starts to add some pretty neat functionality to Twitter. I do Twitterpolls all the time, but if I ask people to respond with a specfic keyword (for example, TP42a), I can get an RSS feed of just those results. Perhaps I could even use a widget to display JUST those results into something…. like a blog post for example.

So if I posted a Twitterpoll asking, “What’s your favorite Twitter hack or application?”, I could dynamically display the results below. Now wouldn’t that be nifty, eh? Tweet Scan seems to be lagging about 12-24 hours behind real-time, but results should start to pop in below.

UPDATE:
Well, they should. But they didn’t. In fact, there’s a two day blackout period that Tweetscan isn’t finding any results in. Very disappointing. YOu can see the results on a TerraMinds search, but the RSS feed seems wonky and I couldn’t get it to populate below. Very bummed about that. But it’s not worth investing any more time into right now. Feh.

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