How to Use Twitterfall: Digg Spy for Tweets

by Patrick Altoft on January 27, 2009

Twitterfall is a new application (kind of like Digg Spy) that lets you monitor upcoming trends on twitter. It was only launched a few days ago, but the reception seems very favourable. Although not groundbreaking, there are some unique positive points about the service.

First off, it lets you view up to 60 tweets. The frequency of the tweets monitored so far is pretty fast, in fact faster than twitter search.

By far the biggest benefit of the service is the customisation of your search trends – although this is in beta at the moment, I think there are some great opportunities to develop further.

Having tested it only for half an hour, I came up with the following uses for service:

  1. Build a list of keywords you want to monitor – its faster than twitter search.
  2. Want to follow only specific peoples tweets for a while? Create a list and add them as your custom filters.
  3. Find people with common interests as they tweet. Use your follow criteria keyword as filters.
  4. Want to follow a particular event or conference? Just use the hash tag or/keyword as the only custom filter.
  5. Use it like a customer support mechanism, pretty much like twitter search.

There are some hurdles for the developers to leap, especially adding the functionality to be able to link to a trending result, but I think the application will end up with many more uses than the few I have highlighted above.

About the author: Rishi is a Search Strategist specialising in Small Business SEM. If you like, you may follow him on twitter at www.twitter.com/rishil

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.

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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

Andy C 27 Jan 2009 at 1:48 pm

Unfortunate name. Just one letter away from TwitterFail.

‘And, for that reason, I’m out.’

Levi Wardell 29 Jan 2009 at 7:08 pm

I agree with your observations here. The clean UI is a bonus too but there is one feature I’d really like to see on this already robust system.

When reviewing the other users who are being filtered through, it would be cool if you could look at relevance stats. Basically if you could click on a usr and see some basic info to include how often they tweet on the same topics you tweet on. That may help when deciding who to follow.

Thoughts?

Jalada 30 Jan 2009 at 11:36 am

@2:
Do you mean similar to what Mr.Tweet does? We could look into it. We’re certainly looking to make some sort of info dialog that comes up when you click on a user so that you don’t have to leave Twitterfall :-)

{ 2 trackbacks }

Twitterfall - a perfect Twitter interface for journalists? | Online Journalism Blog
02.24.09 at 11:15 pm
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04.24.09 at 4:31 pm

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