Tools of the Trade - by Patrick Thornton on Thursday, April 2, 2009 13:24 - View Comments

Save Twitter searches to help with research and reporting

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savedsearches1

Twitter now allows users to save searches via its Web interface.

Twitter’s integration of search.twitter.com (formerly Summize) into its Web interface is nearly complete. With this integration comes more features, flexibility and power. It has made the Web interface of Twitter a much more usable tool for content producers.

For journalists and people who frequently search for certain terms, this new feature can make life a lot easier and make for a great research tool. I have some topics saved so that I can monitor what people are saying about the practices of beatblogging and link journalism, for instance. TweetDeck and some other Twitter applications have already allowed users to save searches, but the Twitter.com saved search has some advantages.

The most obvious is that you can save searches on Twitter.com and view them from any Web browser. Maybe one day saved searches will become part of the Twitter API and be portable across any application. Also, I find it very easy to go between numerous saved searches in the Web interface, whereas it can be a bit clunky using TweetDeck with a lot of saved searches.

Saving searches can also make writing a post easier. If I’m writing a post about crowdsourcing, for instance, I can go create custom searches for “crowd sourcing” and crowdsourcing and monitor them for a few hours.

One of the most power parts of the new search functionality on Twitter is that it supports the same advanced operators as search.twitter.com. If you aren’t familiar with everything that search.twitter.com can do (and it really takes Twitter to a new level for journalists and content producers), check out our screencast on the search.twitter.com.

advanced_operators1

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  • http://virtualjournalist.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/saved-searches-come-to-twitter/ Saved searches come to Twitter « Virtualjournalist

    [...] Beatblogging reports that Twitter has now developed a Web interface allowing users to save their searches. [...]

  • http://www.danielbachhuber.com/ Daniel

    I still don’t have the darn search bar. Who do you know at Twitter? :)

  • http://www.patthorntonfiles.com Patrick Thornton

    @Daniel,

    Ha, I don’t know, but I always seem to get Twitter features as soon as they are released. Similar on other social networks too. I usually join networks fairly early, which might have something to do with it. I was a member of Twitter in 2007.

    Maybe I get new features quickly on Twitter because I tweet way too much. :) That’s probably the real reason. Sad as it is.

  • http://www.flywheelventures.com Scott L Caruso

    You might seriously consider http://www.filtrbox.com which is like Google alerts on steroids. It maintains a persistent search across new media (blogs, twitter, forums, etc) and traditional media. Plug in a few keywords and check out the daily briefing on your topics of choice! There is a free version and a premium version with pricing starting at $10/month. An amazingly valuable tool for anyone in the publishing business.

  • http://www.manjamedia.com Mandy Jenkins

    I am one of the great unwashed without the new features, but I use the Power Twitter plugin for Firefox 3 that adds quite a bit to the Twitter web interface as well (though I don’t use the web interface very often). It has built in search options as well as full link previews for shortened URLs and Twitpics automatically displayed. I like it so far – at least until I get my Twitter upgrade.

  • http://beatblogging.org/2009/05/01/daily-dose-of-social-media-enterprises-still-driving-yugos-with-ie-6/ Daily Dose of social media: Enterprises still driving Yugos with IE 6 | BeatBlogging.Org

    [...] integrated search now live for all users — We reported on this awhile ago, but it’s finally live for all users (MsBeat was livid when she wasn’t one of the lucky [...]

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BeatBlogging.org was a grant-funded journalism project that studied how journalists used social media and other Web tools to improve beat reporting. It ran for about two years, ending in the fall of 2009.

New content is occasionally produced here by the this project's former editor Patrick Thornton. The site is still up and will remain so because many journalists and professors still use and link to the content. BeatBlogging.org offers a fascinating glimpse into the former stages of journalism and social media. Today it's expected that journalists and journalism organization use social media, but just a few years ago that wasn't the case.

About the Author of this post
Patrick Thornton is the editor and lead writer of BeatBlogging.Org. He is @pwthornton on Twitter.