MakeUseOf » twitter search

CloudMagic – Find What You Need In Gmail, Google Apps & Twitter Quick & Easy

Dave LeClair — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 01:31:08 +0000

Nowadays, we are all signed up for so many different services, it can be hard to keep track of them all. We all have Gmail, Google Apps, Twitter and so many more accounts. When you need to find something specific, it can be a real hassle. CloudMagic is a service that is designed to help you search Google Apps, Gmail and Twitter, all from one convenient place. With one simple search query, you will be able to find results from these services, without having to check each one individually.

CloudMagic is available as an application for Android and iPhone, as well in your web browser via their website, a handy Google Chrome extension and a Firefox add-on. Basically, if you are looking for a way to make searching for stuff easier, there is a one hundred percent chance that CloudMagic offers a way for you to use their service. We all want to make our lives a little easier, and CloudMagic could be just the solution you need.

What Does CloudMagic Do?

CloudMagic allows you to import your Gmail, Google Apps and Twitter account so they can all be searched from one place quickly and easily. With CloudMagic, you can type in a search query, and it will scan all three of the accounts for that term.

Therefore, if you typed in the name “John”, for example, it would find any instances of John appearing in your Google Apps, any emails with the name John and tweets. This makes it much easier to find something that could be on any of the accounts.

Setting Up Cloud Magic

Of course, if you are going to be using the Chrome, Firefox, iOS or Android version of the app, you will need to download and install them. If you are using the browser-based version, you can simply point your browser to cloudmagic.com.

Setting up Cloud Magic is a breeze. Whether using one of their mobile apps or doing it from your browser, the first step is creating a new account. Creating an account only requires an email address and a password. It literally takes about two seconds.

Once you have created an account the next step is to link your account with your Google and Twitter accounts. To do this, you will need to click on “Settings” on the mobile app and “Services” on the browser-based app. From there you will need to click “Add New Service” and log in with whichever service you would like to add.

If you log in with your Google and Twitter accounts on your phone, these accounts will be there when you log in on the computer, and vice versa. This makes it easy to use your mobile app while on the phone and your computer when you are at home.

Using Cloud Magic

Using CloudMagic is a snap. Once you have your accounts synced, simply click the search bar and enter what you are looking for. It will quickly scan all of your accounts to find items matching the term you entered. The search is blazing fast; it is quite impressive.

You can narrow your search to only specific things. If you only wanted to find calendar events that match your query, you can simply click the “Events” button. This way, if you wanted to find a doctor’s appointment without seeing tweets and emails about it, you could do so.

Of course, simply showing you the results would be useless. That is why you can click any result to be quickly directed to the proper application, either from your phone or from your computer.

Conclusion

This is a great application for quickly finding what you need from select services. I hope that they incorporate other services such as Facebook and other email clients (but let us be honest, almost everyone uses Gmail). As it stands, it is a great solution for organizing your Google and Twitter account, and I definitely recommend checking it out on your platform of choice.

Web Link
iTunes Link
Android Link
Chrome Link
Firefox Link

Search Through All The Data On Gmail, Google Apps & Twitter With CloudMagic

Saikat Basu — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 18:00:56 +0000

We are always searching for something. These days it’s probably less about our lives and more on the web. Well, if that’s so, then the browser extension called CloudMagic deserves at least a look-see and maybe an install. CloudMagic as the name implies, is all about the services on the cloud. The magic is that it is a super-fast way to search across multiple services – Twitter, Gmail, Google Apps Email, Google Docs, Calendar, and Contacts. Plus, CloudMagic does it all on a unified single interface.

We search with our browsers. That’s why it makes sense to have a search app on our browser of choice. CloudMagic is a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox. It is supported on Windows XP and above, Mac OS X 10.5+ & Linux (32- & 64-bit) kernel versions 2.4.x and above.

I am trying out CloudMagic 3.11 Beta on Firefox which is a 2.9 MB install.

Setting It Up With Your Accounts

There’s nothing much to do really. You install the browser extension and add your accounts for the respective services. CloudMagic goes to work indexing all the data in the services you have authenticated…and it’s fast. CloudMagic supports multiple accounts.

That’s nice, but what’s nicer is that CloudMagic stores all log-in details and the indexed data locally. That’s a few extra points for security, privacy, and peace of mind.

Super-Fast Instant Search…& All In One Place

Search should be at express speed. Nor arguments on that. No arguments also because CloudMagic search IS fast. As you can see that the magic all happens from the little floating box which makes an appearance when you log-in to one of your accounts.

You can bolster the search further by playing around with the settings on view. You can open up separate search windows, replace your default search (for e.g. Gmail’s search), or click on Preferences and put a check against Enable combined search.

Remember: As the data is indexed and kept locally, you can search through your multiple accounts even in the offline mode and also when you aren’t logged into the other registered accounts. I think that’s a pretty powerful option to have especially for your services on the cloud.

Here’s how a search appears. You can click on those orange colored highlighted keywords and open up a preview of the document that has it. You can click on the Events, Docs, Contacts, and Tweets tab to get the search hits on those apps. I find it especially useful when I want to quickly look up a contact or a document in Google Docs. That’s a plus because CloudMagic helps you search n’ work so smoothly between Gmail and Google Docs and across all your accounts registered with CloudMagic.

I am not going to get Steve Jobs in my Contacts, but definitely there are some mentions on my Twitter feed.

Another thing you will immediately notice is that CloudMagic goes to work immediately as you start typing. That helps you to narrow down on the right kind of search by trying out partial keywords.

For Power Users – The Advanced Search Operators

CloudMagic supports the same advanced search operators as Google and Twitter thus giving power users another spanner to work with. You can use it from the regular search box itself. Here’s a quick look at the page which lists them.

A Good N’ Fast Twitter Search

There’s little doubt that the default Gmail search is a speedy beast. But I can’t say the same for Twitter search always. It also has a few limitations as due to resource constraints, not every Tweet can be indexed in Twitter Search. It reaches back to only the last ten days and there’s a cap (I think) on the number of tweets indexed. It’s also not search-as-you-type like Google Instant. By indexing your Twitter timeline locally, you get to work around these limitations. And you can go offline too.

It’s All About Speed Baby!

Search is about speed and hitting the bull’s eye. CloudMagic delivers on both counts. It also delivers on the other productivity counts like giving us a single integrated interface that links all the supported accounts – offline or online.

Give CloudMagic a run and tell us if you find it to be a worthy ally in your efforts to search the cloud.

5 Cool Twitter Search Tricks To Monitor What People Are Saying About You

Ann Smarty — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 01:31:45 +0000

If you own a website or are just trying to earn money online as a freelancer, it is always good to know what people are saying about you over the Internet. People may be citing you, sharing experiences about your services or recommending you. In any case, you may want to be there to answer any questions, make contacts, and so on.

One of the best tools to listen to online conversations is Twitter and here are a few actionable suggestions.

How Do You Create Twitter Feeds?

Despite the fact that Twitter has weirdly removed the direct option to grab the RSS feed of any search, all the RSS links are still working.

To create an RSS feed, add your search query after this URL string:

http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=

For example:

http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=cool software
http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=”cool software” (for exact match)

There’s also a simple web-based app to generate Twitter search RSS links:
http://sociable.co/social-media/twitter-rss-feed-creator/

Here are a few useful tips we have previously covered on having fun with RSS feeds, which you are likely to find useful for using the search tricks listed in this article:

And now the actual tips on creating useful RSS feeds to track you and your business mentions on Twitter!

1. Reduce Any Clutter: Filter Out Retweets

While retweeting is great for expanding the reach of the update, retweets are actually one and the same message repeated again and again. Seeing multiple retweeted messages in your personal reputation management feed may result in one important update getting lost in the clutter.

Luckily Twitter search supports the – operator that lets you filter out all the updates containing a specific word from the search results:

["You (brand) name" -rt]

Example

2. Monitor Only Real Opinions: Filter Out Links

Let’s face it: most Twitter updates are aimed to share a link. If you blog a lot, your name (or moniker) is mostly mentioned on Twitter next to the post you have written. But do you want to only monitor “real” conversations?

Here’s a good way: Twitter supports the filter:links operator that searches only for tweets containing links. If we use the above mentioned trick, we’ll make it work vice versa excluding all linked updates from search results.

["You (brand) name" -filter:links]

Example

Similarly, you can also filter all updates referencing your Twitter username (you will be updated about these by Twitter itself via email or by your Twitter client):

[-from:username] – filters out all tweets coming from a user;

[-@username] – filters out all tweets referencing a user.

Example

3. Monitor Negative Mentions

This tip is especially useful for e-commerce site owners and geeky customer support managers. You can focus on negative mentions by including in the results.

["You (brand) name" ]

Example

4. Monitor Questions Mentioning You Or Your Business

Another great tip for service owners: you can create a separate feed to monitor all questions about you or your business name.

["Your (brand) name" ?] – make sure to use a space before the question mark.

Example

5. Include Your Name & Your Moniker(s) In Search Results

Lastly, here’s the easiest tip: you are most likely to be known by several names online: your name, username, site name, etc. You can include all these mentions in search results using OR operator:

["You business name" OR "Your name" OR "Your moniker]

Example

Are you tracking your name mentions on Twitter! I hope I have inspired you to! Please let me know your thoughts!

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by krossbow

Search For Twitter Hashtags You Don’t Know & Get Definitions With Tagdef

Joshua Lockhart — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:31:34 +0000

Language is a constantly evolving creature that consistently steals words from other cultures, adapts itself to foreign tongues, and often shortens itself for easier use. However, with the advent of Twitter, we have an entirely new element of communication – hashtags.

Hashtags, a creation of Twitter, are keywords highlighted in a post utilizing the pound symbol (‘#’). These keywords are often used on a massive scale, leading to trending tweets which reveal the world’s hottest topics. That’s all well and good, but what happens if you don’t know what those hashtags mean?

Define Your Culture

In a similar fashion to Urban Dictionary and the Wiktionary, Tagdef offers itself as a web-tool with the sole purpose of defining our modern, rapidly-moving world. However, unlike its predecessors that focus primarily on current slang or clique-spurred jargon, this community-fueled publication takes on the challenge of defining trending tweets.

Here, you can find multiple definitions for the most viral trends in the world. Granted, the site is not moderated in any form or fashion, so your experience may give you as much intellectual wisdom as you would gain by just staring at a bathroom stall wall (which in many cases is actually a whole lot of wisdom). However, based on my personal usage of Tagdef, I have to say that it has a pretty solid set of definitions for a site that is user-based. Furthermore, it uses a Reddit-like voting system, so users can decide which definitions are the most accurate.

The site mainly serves as a search engine for Twitter hashtags, so there is a lack of a decent browsing feature. I remember that back in high school, I would sit around and look things up on Urban Dictionary, and Tagdef – which is an even more modern Urban Dictionary – could have done well by installing this function on their site. This does not take away from its usefulness, but it never hurts to add a bit of fun to everything.

A Real-Time World Glossary

Tagdef focuses on a flow of trending hashtags, so the homepage is always going to display the most current words that are on the tips of thumbs everywhere. Five categories are offered: Trending Tags, New Tags, Top Today, Top this Week, and All Time High. As you might guess, the site pulls these sets of trends directly from Twitter itself in an effort to encourage users to define them for the rest of the world. Furthermore, Tagdef provides cleanly-displayed trend statistics and graphs for all you number-crunchers out there.

Despite my dissatisfaction that #justinbieber is a common definition on the homepage (thank you to all the parents who gave smartphones to their daughters under the age of thirteen), the tool is a really cool way to keep up with what’s going on in the world. That being said, I would say that the definitions given are best described as leads for furthering your research on current events.

A Tagdef definition may give you a general idea of what is going on in the world, but using keywords found in definitions, you will get a general idea of the news that people are talking about. For instance, you may see an incredibly vague tag floating around, so just pop it into Tagdef, look up the definitions, and you’ll be treated with the latest current events written in layman’s terms. How would I have ever known that Bieber is “the most amazingest boy ever” without Tagdef?

Conclusion

Is Tagdef worth bookmarking? Absolutely. It’s a handy Twitter hashtag search tool for explaining things you might not understand on Twitter, and it is also a good way to prevent potential pop culture embarrassment in front of friends. Are you going to spend a lot of time using it? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a poor website – it just does what it’s supposed to do.

What other tools do you use to define Internet-lingo? Have you made use of Tagdef before?

How To Find Travel Inspiration With Various Twitter Accounts

Ann Smarty — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 01:31:30 +0000

Summer is a high traveling season for many of our readers, so we try to share more travel tools and tips here. This post is about travel inspiration – how to discover more fun places when traveling.

We have already shared quite a few tools to broaden your travel outlook: here are some travel quizzes improve your travel IQ, here’s a fun smartphone app to discover and share journeys and don’t forget to check these sites for virtual sightseeing with travel videos. This post is about finding travel inspiration by planning your journey with Twitter!

Track Traveling Hashtags

Traveling is more about fun than anything else and if you need more ideas on how to enjoy your time here’s the list of popular Twitter hashtags to fill up your week:

Monday: #MexMonday

If you are going to Mexico or are just looking for a Mexican restaurant, this hashtag will get you inspired any time you check the latest search results.

One more less popular, yet very interesting one I have found via this travel blog: #MountainMonday

This hashtag is a great way to really want to go on vacation: watch people share beautiful photos of the mountains they are climbing right now!

Tuesday: both #TravelTuesday and #TT

A very popular hashtag about all things-travel: find memes to follow here, travel-related news and scandals, trending destinations, etc:

Wednesday: #WineWednesday

Another one for food travelers: share your wine on Wednesday and get inspired by seeing what winery others recommend.

Thursday: #BeachThursday

A great one for the summer vacation. If you are still unsure which beach to spend your summer vacation at, monitor this hashtag for plenty of photos and ideas:

Friday: ##FriFotos

The theme is announced on Tuesday, then on Friday the participants are tweeting photos of the declared destination.

Follow & Track the Right Twitter Accounts

Depending on your destination and aims, there may be various accounts you can try and follow such as official city Twitter accounts, local bloggers, tour operators and hotel managers. There is no way that all possible travel-related Twitter accounts can be listed in one article. Below are just a few useful and creative examples – you’ll need to find more using one or all of the following tips:

(Most obvious) Use Google: a simple search [City Name + Twitter] should normally get you the official Twitter account in the top 3 results;
Use Twitter bio search: in my previous post, I listed three tools for Twitter people search: now just try to search it for [official CITY NAME] or [HOTEL NAME] and you are likely to find the official accounts or a few representatives:

General

Travel – State Dept is an official Twitter account for U.S. Department of State Bureau of Consular Affairs. If you a US citizen traveling abroad, be sure to follow this account and check it for some essential news and updates like worldwide hurricanes, embassy news, passport procedures, etc:

Twitter Accounts For US Traveling

Most of the US cities are on Twitter, so if you are planning a trip to the United States, it’s a good idea to find the city officials on Twitter. We can’t obviously list all tweeting cities here, but here’s a large list of California cities on Twitter, for example.

Below are some more cities :

TravelPortland is an official Portland account that tweets all local events and also answers related questions (asked with #inpdx in the tweet)

Twisney is an interesting example of a creative Twitter bot – it automatically tweets and retweets all updates that are geotagged from Walt Disney World Resort.

NewYorkology tweets many times a day sharing interesting events in New York which are taking place right now.

UK Traveling

GoodPubGuide tweets a pub of the day: follow the account to discover new places to spend a fun evening at!

Londonist publishes frequent updates with fun ideas about what you can do right now in London, from community festivals to great sales – you won’t find these events anywhere else!

More examples? Here’s a great list of the most popular hotels on Twitter and here’s a huge collection of the most active tweeting airlines. Next time you travel, use a Twitter-friendly service as they seem to care more.

Any other fun tips on how Twitter can help you traveling? Please share them in the comments!

Image Credit: gettyicons

2Lingual: Search Google & Twitter By Voice In Multiple Languages [Google Chrome]

Ann Smarty — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 01:31:56 +0000

A couple of months ago, Google added a notable feature to their browser: support for the HTML speech input API which enabled developers to allow web applications to transcribe users’ voice to text. This basically means that the site owners can now add voice recognition features to their websites (which will only be available to Google Chrome users, obviously). When a webpage has this feature, the users can speak into their computer’s microphone and the recorded audio is then sent to speech servers for transcription, and then the text is typed out.

The 2Lingual developers have incorporated the new browser feature into their multilingual search tools and have now provided us with Google Multilingual Voice Search and Twitter Multilingual Voice Search. Both the tools support 51 Speech-to-Text Languages including various regional variations. For example, for English, there’s American English, British English, Canadian English, Australian English, Indian English and South African English.

Obviously, both tools work only in Google Chrome. In other browsers you simply won’t see the microphone icon to speak. Voice Search requires a Speech-to-Text capable browser like Google Chrome version 11.0.696. You’ll also obviously need a headset and microphone to speak into.

1. Search Google By Voice

To search, click the tiny microphone icon in the search field and say out loud what you want to search for:

If the tool couldn’t hear you, you will be offered the option to check your microphone settings:

If what you said wasn’t clear enough, the tool will suggest other possible phrases you were probably going to search for:

If you don’t select any of the suggested alternative search queries, they will disappear in a few seconds.

If you want to speak any other language, just select it from the drop-down:

And keep searching:

The tool works surprisingly fast fetching results almost instantly. It does look like a huge time-saver for multi-lingual search engine users.

2. Search Twitter By Voice

Twitter multilingual voice search is a later addition to the tool that lets you search Twitter by voice. Similarly, just click a microphone icon in the search field and speak your search term:

More tools from the same developer which were previously reviewed on MUO:

2Lingual: Google-powered Bilingual Search Engine that makes it easy to search in 2 separate languages and provides a query translation option for your cross-lingual searches. I have included this one into my post listing 3 tools to see and compare search results side by side.
2lingual: Bilingual Twitter Search: Another two-language tool for Twitter.

Other Voice Search & Speech Recognition Tools:

Tazti – Search Web, Play Music & Control Programs using Voice: a desktop speech recognition software;
VoiceSearch: Adds Voice Search To Google Chrome: a Google Chrome extension that lets you search by voice. The supported sites include Google, Bing, Wikipedia, YouTube, Wolfram Alpha and DuckDuckGo
Taskos: To-do List App That Responds To Voice Commands: a free smartphone app for Android phones. Through this app you can create new tasks using voice commands.

The tools look both fun and useful and they may come in handy for heavy search users. What do you think of them?

3 Tools For Twitter People Search

Ann Smarty — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 01:30:20 +0000

Over time we have shared quite a few Twitter search tips including this post on using real-time search to find a job and this guide on using Twitter to find great links.

Today’s post doesn’t tackle the “real-time” Twitter search – instead, it’s about search for people on Twitter by words they use in the “Bio” section.

The tools below can have various possible applications: for example, you can find representatives of a business you are planning to buy from or employees from a company you are interested in working for.

You can use any of the tools to ask for quotes, build new friendships or create stats reports (for example, if you’re trying to analyze which brands are making the biggest inroads on Twitter). For more inspiration, I am offering examples of possible searches for each of the tools below:

Twiangulate

Twiangulate (find our previous Twiangulate review here) is a very interesting tool in terms of its searching feature. While it has many other options, the “Bio search” hides behind the “Keyword” tab. Whatever you search, the tool will find the matches in user name, bio and city (there’s no way to filter results by bio matches exclusively, as far as I know).

What makes this search app that interesting? Well, as a search geek I couldn’t help appreciating some of its really nice functionality:

1) Meaningful results:

According to their FAQ, the tool aims at giving you meaningful results, i.e. the list of users that look like human beings and are worth following:

We want to focus on meaningful results. @BarackObama follows 740,646 people, and as far as we can tell, their names and distribution is pretty much random. Same for other tweeps who follow 10s or 100s of thousands of people.

2) Stemming support:

Whenever you search for “tech”, words with the same root will be included in search results: “technology”, “Techcrunch”, etc:

3) Support of “boolean” operators:

Include both of these words: search [word1 & word2]
Find at least one of these words: search [word1 OR word2]
Exclude words: search [word1 !word2]
Find the exact match: search ["word1 word2"]

4) Handy sorting options:

You can sort results by the number of followers or “followees” as well as by name and location.

Interesting search ideas to play with:

Find fellow club members: search ["club name"], e.g. ["Sierra Club"]
Find people who are interesting in technology near by: search [tech & city-name], e.g. [tech & boston]

FollowerWonk

FollowerWonk (find our previous FollowerWonk review here) is another search tool that helps you find users by words mentioned in their bios. It allows to search by:

A keyword used in the bio;
User locations (yes, you can list many cities separated by comma).

The tool also has very strong advanced and boolean syntax support (including the 4 operators I have listed above for Twiangulate).

Interesting search idea to play with: Do you need some inspiration for writing your own Twitter bio? See what others do: search what people love or hate: [i (love|hate)]

LocaFollow

LocaFollow (find our previous LocaFollow review here) is advertised as a tool to find “Tweeps” nearby but its search capabilities do go beyond that. Using the app you can search by any of (or any imaginable combination of) the following criteria:

A word mentioned in a bio;
Location;
A word included in the username;
A word mentioned in his recent Tweets.

Interesting search idea to play with: Do you need a source or a person to interview? Search for people by profession who tweet about your topic, for example, journalists who live in New York and tweet about Technology:

Your search:

The results:

Are you aware of any other cool tools to search Twitter users by their interests? Please share them in the comments!

5 Twitter Job Services For Some Real-Time Job Search

Saikat Basu — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 19:31:35 +0000

Twitter may not merit a serious look as a job hunting and recruitment tool. But that’s something a fresher or even an experienced professional will be ill advised to overlook. You can bet that when Twitter increasingly has the power to spread revolutions, it can be a vital ally of your job hunting campaign.

In its overreaching popularity lies its job hunting prowess. Companies are increasingly using it spread their updates. Vacancies and recruitment’s are just one of them.

Even if you do a simple search for a job lead on Twitter, you will be surprised at the number of links that total up. I am not even telling you to do an advanced Twitter search or develop industry specific social strategy. We are talking here of Twitter services that do the job of distilling relevant job tweets for you so that you can find jobs on Twitter.

Here are five of them.

Tweet My Jobs

Somehow the image on this Twitter job app says it all. It is probably the largest Twitter job board on the web. The About page says that they have 10,052 vertical job channels segmented by geography, job type, and industry. The service is used by people on both sides of the table, the recruiters as well as the job seekers. It is free for job seekers. As a job seeker, you can sign-up and subscribe to a channel of your interest. Any news jobs available are sent as instant notifications as a Twitter feed or on your mobile. Beyond this, you can use the service like a regular job site: post your resume to companies or forward jobs to friends. Using TweetMap, a Google Maps mashup, you can geographically target jobs of your interest.

TwitJobSearch

This Twitter job search engine is another well designed and maintained service which could be the answer to your job search prayers. You can instantly sign-in with your Twitter account and start a hunt. The site allows you to save jobs to your account, have an online resume, and network. Creating a profile on this web service involves some fine-detailing as recruiters see what has been posted. You can also link the public LinkedIn URL or any other online CV you might have. The Advanced Search is just one way to trawl through Twitter job updates. For an industry specific browse, you can go to the directory which lists ‘Job Accounts’ for selected countries. Using the Job Map, you can visually see the jobs that have been tweeted about in the last 72 hours. The site also has a free iPhone app.

Job Shouts

The easiest way to get the dope on the latest job postings collected by this site is via Twitter. JobShouts.com is a social search tool for jobs across many job boards that include LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. All jobs are screened by the site, so the potential to hit the genuine ones is much higher for the job seeker.

Tweetajob

Jobseekers can search for jobs related to their interests and like most Twitter services, you can target jobs by location. Think of Tweetajob as a job search engine powered by Twitter. You can choose to receive job tweets on your Twitter feed or as SMS alerts on your mobile phone. Start searching with your Twitter account and build your profile as it helps the service to send you more targeted job alerts. The site is limited to U.S job postings currently.

Twitter JobCast

The site serves as a simple listing for jobs put out by employers. If you have a Twitter account, you can @reply and find out your suitability for the job. Because it is a simple listing with a #hiring hashtag, the quality may not be top-notch, so it falls upon the job seeker to do all the screening before applying for the job. The listing covers United States, Australia, Canada, UK, and India.

There’s probably nothing more real time than a job search. These five Twitter tools could just help you get ahead of the queue. Here are some more posts that you can pack in your arsenal:

8 Sites For Beating The Job Hunting Blues
Top 10 Most Effective Job Search Websites
5 Salary Comparison Tools For Your Next Job Search
4 Tricks To Get Better Results From Job Search Engines

Do you know of any other search tools to find jobs on Twitter that we can add to the list? Also, do let us know if you have ever managed to bag a job with the help of Twitter.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

3 Methods To Create Your Own Searchable Twitter Archive

Ann Smarty — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 01:31:23 +0000

If you want to secure your tweets against any issues that might happen to Twitter and its servers, consider backing up your Twitter shares. If you use Twitter as a bookmarking tool sharing the most interesting links you come across, you may want to create a searchable archive to be able to quickly find a link you remember sharing a few days or months ago.

Twitter search could be a good solution (there is also a handy from: operator that allows you to find all tweets from any user) but it is only able to work for recently shared links. Twitter search only stores tweets for up to 10 days. If you want to be able to search through older tweets, consider using one (or all) of these tools to create a searchable archive of your tweets or any other Twitter-powered databases.

1. Archive & Search Tweets Using Google Reader

The great thing about Twitter is that almost everything has an RSS feed. There is an RSS link for your own updates as well as for the updates from any user. There’s also an RSS link for any search results. Obviously, you can grab that RSS feed link to subscribe using Google Reader:

From now on, your Twitter archive will be stored within your Google Reader giving you flexibility to search using some Google advanced operators:

Exclude Any Word From Your Search Results: use – key;
Force Any Word In Your Search Results: use + key;
Force An Exact Match: use quotes;
Control The Proximity Of The Exact Match (wildcard search): use an asterisk to replace some words in your query.

Unlike general Google search (where one asterisk stands for one or more words), Google Reader search treats each asterisk as one word. This means that if you want two words in between your exact-match query, you will need to use two asterisks:

While this approach seems quite perfect, there are some issues reported about the number of updates archived via Google Reader. For some active hashtags, for example, Google Reader seems to pull only the most recent 30 results. This probably happens because Twitter limits the number of updates in its RSS. The possible workaround is the next tool.

2. Archive & Search Tweets Using TwapperKeeper

TwapperKeeper is a handy web-based tool that allows you to create Twitter archives from any #hashtag, keyword or @person. The archive is being constantly updated, can be exported to Excel and provides an RSS link for tracking:

You can use this RSS feed to archive and search Tweets in Google Reader or you can use the standalone tool and its inherent search options:

Search by date;
Search by Twitter user;
Search by keyword;
Filter out all RTs:

3. Archive & Search Tweets Using Trunk.ly

Trunk.ly is the most basic and sweetest tool of all listed in this article. All it does is store your Twitter, Facebook or any RSS feed updates and lets you search through it by keyword.

The sweet part is that:

It has a very nice clutter-free interface which makes scanning through results quite fun;
It displays a favicon for each source URL (for linked updates) which lets you easier identify the tweet;
It aggregates your Twitter and Facebook shares.

Let’s Put it All Together!

	Google Reader	Twapper Keeper	Trunk.ly
Create archive for…	Any user, any search results (including advanced search results like near: and filter:links searches)	Any user, any hashtag, any keyword (no advanced search results here)	Your account (via auth) or any RSS feed
Search options	Exclude any word, force exact match, control the proximity	Set the date range, search by Twitter user, filter our RTs	None (search by keyword)

Are you aware of any more ways to create a Twitter archive that would enable you to search for previously shared links and updates? Please let us know your thoughts!

4 Creative Uses For Twitter For People Who Think Twitter Is Useless

Justin Pot — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 18:31:34 +0000

America’s Library of Congress recently announced it intends to index the entirety of Twitter‘s archive. This is a massive undertaking, as every day there are in excess of 20 million messages sent out on Twitter.

Even if you never intend to send out a message of 140 characters or less you have to admit Twitter is a powerful cultural phenomenon. It’s already fueled at least one revolution.

Having said that, it’s understandable that many don’t understand what all the fuss is about: isn’t it just another social network?

Yes and no.

Twitter can be used as a social network, but there are also other creative uses for Twitter – such as a search engine, a local event planner or a newspaper. And you don’t need an active Twitter account to take advantage of those uses.

Let’s take a look at a few creative uses for Twitter for those who think Twitter is useless.

Real-Time Search Engine

In the summer of 2006 I worked as a carpet cleaner at Calvin College, where I attended university. The school has a different vibe during the summer, as it’s mostly international students who stay behind and work while American students go home to their families. I mention this only because on Thursday, June 26 a curious thing happened just outside my window: every single Ghanaian I knew was sprinting across the yard of the apartment complex with a flag behind them.

Why? As it turns out, the Ghanaian football team had just defeated team USA in the World Cup. I found out about this a day later when I asked my friends why they were celebrating. Were this to happen today however, I’d simply do a quick Twitter search for Ghana and immediately find out what happened.

Which brings me to perhaps the biggest use Twitter has for people who think Twitter is useless: real-time search. If something is happening somewhere in the world, you can be sure someone is talking about it on Twitter. This power cannot be underestimated.

For example, this year the World Cup is set to take place in South Africa. A quick search for “worldcup” on Twitter reveals all sorts of conversation happening:

This can be very useful if there’s a certain subject you like to keep up on, and you do not need a Twitter account to run a search. Simply go to Twitter Search and enter any subject you like.

If you want a little more depth on this subject, check out Nancy’s recent article about websites that show you the hottest Twitter topics now.

What’s Happening In Your Town?

On a related note, Twitter is a great way to find out what’s happening in your town right now. I regularly search for my home – Boulder, Colorado – and usually find out a lot about what’s going on around town.

Twitter is particularly active in Boulder, because of the university here in town and the sheer number of tech startups, so there’s always something new to discover in this way. But I’m sure if you search for your town, wherever you are, you’ll find at least a few fun and interesting things.

You’ll also find a lot of spam, sadly, but you will get used to skimming over that and finding the good stuff.

RSS Feeds

I’m by far your favorite writer on this site. I’m smart, attractive and extremely humble. As such, you want to know about every article I write. You can do that by watching my Twitter page.

My own vanity aside, Twitter RSS feeds are a great way to follow an individual writer’s work regardless of the site they post it on. Just head over to anyone’s Twitter page where you’ll find an RSS icon in the right column:

Do this and you’ll be able to watch the online activities of anyone without ever creating a Twitter account. RSS feeds can plug into Firefox, Google Reader and an endless number of other apps!

Boxee

I try to mention Boxee whenever possible, and it just so happens that it recently integrated Twitter feeds. Create a Twitter account, follow your favorite video creators and any new videos they make will show up in the left column of your Boxee homepage.

I started following Autotune The News specifically so I’d find out about new videos in Boxee; recommend any feeds worth following in the comments below.

Conclusion

There you have it: four uses for Twitter for people who think Twitter is useless. I’m by no means the definitive expert on the topic, and I’m sure you all can think of many more ideas for making use of Twitter. Inform your fellow readers about these uses in the comments below!