For those who haven't caught up on the latest web fad, Twitter is a fast-moving 140-character micro-blog format.
Unlike Facebook, where "friends" are mutually agreed-upon connections, Twitter has a much more free-flowing style. You can "follow" people such as Stephen Fry or blogs, including our own PC Authority, without any need for them following you in return (though it's nice if they do).
Topsy is a new search engine designed to make sense of the stream of tweets from the many millions of Twitter users.
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| Topsy search engine indexes Twitter |
"Topsy doesn't think the Internet is a collection of documents. Or even a web of documents. Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations," says the site's rather twee description, but in practice, it's doing some really interesting things with search technology.
You use Topsy just as you would any other search engine - type in a search term of interest and Topsy lists tweets that match the search term.
Take our basic search for PC Authority, for example (yes, we're vain).
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| It's not just search results, it's also an index of what's hot and who's cool. |
At the top right, there's a single button to "retweet this page"; your search can become part of the twitter conversation as readily as you can retweet any one of the search results.
The left hand side lists a count of tweets about your search term by date, so you can track when something became talked about, and when it faded.
Topsy also treats the people behind the tweets as important artefacts in themselves.
A glance at the search sidebar shows who tweets about your search term most frequently. Click on a person, and you can see their basic Twitter profile, a ranking of their reputation and influentialness, as well as their most recent tweets about your search term. If they have a blog linked to Twitter, that's listed too.
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| We like this guy! |
Topsy looks for links relating to your search terms in particular, and ranks results based on how well they match your search terms, as well as the influence of the people talking about them.
For each search result, there's also a trackback link - shown in a small speech bubble - to show who else tweeted the same link. Topsy offers a small bookmarklet for these trackbacks.
Google, of course, also indexes tweets, but what Topsy is doing to add extra functionality to Twitter searches is done in a way that's going to work for a lot of Twitter-users.