Monitter is a browser based Twitter search engine that is a bit reminiscent of TweetDeck, the popular desktop Twitter client. One of Tweetdeck's most interesting features is that it can display a number of Twitter searches in parallel to each other, which is a great way of keeping track of a certain topic as it makes its way through Twitter. Monitter takes a similar approach and displays three constantly updated keyword searches parallel to each other in your browser.
Monitter is being developed by Alex Holt and has been online since July 27th.
In its current state, Monitter is restricted to always displaying three keyword searches in three separate columns. Once you change the keywords, Monitter will display the last tweet with those keywords in it and then constantly update the search. In our tests, it never took more than 30 seconds before Monitter picked up on a new tweet.
One of the really cool features of Monitter is that you can filer tweets by language. Right now, those languages are English, Spanish, and German. Overall, those filters seemed to work very well. This does, however, also mean that you won't see tweet in other languages, which is a bit of a limitation, but will probably only bother very few users.
As the folks over at Web Worker Daily point out, Monitter also works great in a site specific browser like Fluid on the Mac or Bubbles on the PC.
The Monitter team has also built an embeddable widget so that you can display these searches on your own site. Because of how wide the widget has to be, though, this approach might not be really useful for a lot of people.
There are, of course, various Twitter search engines available already. Summize, which was bought by Twitter and is now the standard Twitter search engine, is great way to search for specific keywords and allows you to reply to tweets right from the application. Twitscoop, which we reviewed about a month ago, is also a very capable Twitter search engine and features a very cool, constantly updating tag cloud.
In terms of its features, one nice addition to Monitter would be the ability to reply to tweets right out of the application. Even more interesting would be the ability to send tweets right out of the app, which would, of course, make it even more of a TweetDeck for the browser (an inspiration that, by the way, the developer fully acknowledges). Also, it would be nice if you could turn off the language filtering.
Overall, though, Monitter is a cool and well designed way to monitor certain keywords on Twitter. It is not so much useful as a search engine, as it only displays the last tweet that matches your keywords. Its power is in constantly updating these search results, and while its competitors can do this as well, Monitter's ability to track more than one search is often very useful. If you already use TweetDeck, this application might not be too useful for you. However, if you are using Twhirl or any other Twitter client, then you could do a lot worse than giving Monitter a try.
Comments
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This is fantastic. I've been adding so many Twitter friends and really getting into twitter recently. This looks awesome.
I could see it being used as a nice current-event tracker too
Posted by: Alex the Freelance Twin | August 5, 2008 6:15 PM
Hey Frederic! Thanks for the positive write up.
With the languages, we could add a feature to show ALL languages (ie, just not filter the search by language at all). I'm also looking into setting up the languages as a select box, so that you can choose from a wider variety.. look out for a new release (follow @monitter on twitter for updates)
Regarding the Widget that we provide on monitter... it's completely CSSable... so if you wanted to make it narrower.. that's totally up to the developer - maybe the download should include a few differen sample layouts so that this is more obvious.
Alex
Posted by: Alex Holt | August 5, 2008 6:52 PM
It absolutely looks a lot like TweetDeck. I wonder if that's an accident, or just a remnant of the Adobe AIR platform.
Posted by: Louis Gray
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August 5, 2008 7:00 PM
@Louis - the developer actually acknowledge that Tweetdeck was the inspiration for this and I think that's why he kept the color scheme, even if the app isn't programmed in AIR. But you can change it to a lighter version as well. But why all AIR apps are so dark by default, I really don't know either...
Posted by: Frederic
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August 5, 2008 7:13 PM
Nice job Alex, I am toying with the conversation monitoring concept on http://spy.appspot.com while messing around with the Google App Engine... Your design senses are much higher than mine! :)
I really feel like apps that monitor and visualize social media conversations will convince the mainstream folks that there is valuable and relevant content in the social universe.
My take - Can making social media a spectator sport move it to the mainstream?
Posted by: Ben Hedrington | August 5, 2008 7:18 PM
very nice - was the only reason I considered using tweetdeck. Just hope they will make it more than 3 search words...
Posted by: Peter Efland
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August 5, 2008 7:27 PM
This is fantastic
Posted by: gvke | August 6, 2008 3:05 AM
i just love those mac only fonts on pro pages... not :/
Posted by: bb | August 6, 2008 3:58 AM
@bb : mac ony fonts?
"Lucida Sans","Trebuchet","Helvetica","Arial";
I'm pretty sure Windows boxes have Helvetica.. and Arial? and i'm sure most linux boxes would have them too?
Anyway.. i've added "sans-serif" to the font stack.. so maybe that will help.
Posted by: Alex Holt | August 6, 2008 5:21 AM
Alex did a great job, this is on http://everythingtwitter.com/2008/07/31/monitter-watch-keywords-realtime/ for a week or so now.
Posted by: Chris Miller | August 6, 2008 8:55 AM
What's really useful is being able to save the query as an RSS-feed. I stuck one in Google Reader and it works fine. That means the number of querys you can save is limitless. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
Posted by: Jonas | August 6, 2008 4:13 PM
Hi,
The application only displays the items of the 3 corresponding search feeds returned by search.twitter.com.
Please note the old results are not visible, only the last 10 from the moment you start and the new appearences.
You can obtain the same thing ( and the old results ) searching term1 OR term2 OR term3 at seach.twitter.com.
Carmen
Posted by: Carmen Holotescu | August 12, 2008 3:40 PM