WhosTalkin: Social Media Search for a Moment in Time
Today, searching through social media sites is much like the days of searching the Web before the advent of Google. Many of us are performing a series of loosely associated searches, and then aggregating them to try to get a glimpse of the bigger picture. To get a good cross-section of the conversation, we're running searches on Twitter and Ice Rocket, creating any number of Google Alerts, and building Yahoo! Pipes to sift through all the sources of information.
The perfect solution isn't there yet. And while no one has truly nailed "social media search," WhosTalkin is definitely a step in the right direction.
WhosTalkin, a social media search engine that recently came out of private beta, provides a simple interface that allows users to search a number of popular blogs and microblogging platforms, news aggregators, networks, video services, images, forums, and popular bookmarking and tagging services. Search results generally provide a decent overview of "who's saying what" about the particular search term, and WhosTalkin does a good job of crawling through a number of services in one fell swoop. Which is good.
The problem is that social media is far more dynamic than the Web of yesteryear. And, unfortunately, WhosTalkin is only good for searching while you're on the site. None of the pages are URL addressable - meaning you can't save or bookmark searches that you perform on a regular basis. Also disconcerting is the fact that there is no obvious RSS feed or alert mechanism to ping users when new results are found. And since the pages aren't URL addressable, it's impossible to run a service like Dapper against them to create your own RSS feeds.
[Update] We're receiving some additional feedback in the comments below. Apparently, the pages are URL addressable, but that option isn't exposed by default.
That said, WhosTalkin is still useful, to a point. I'm still interested in using the service for research purposes or to gauge the current outlook on a particular topic. That has some value. But, it's easy to envision how much more compelling the service could become with some additional features. To become a truly valuable service, WhosTalkin is going to have to incorporate features that allow for the tracking of searches on an ongoing basis.
If you're looking for a quick glimpse at what's happening in social media - right at this very moment - or are interested in performing some one-off searches, WhosTalkin provides a great vantage on the current pulse of what's happening. It's a good first step in social media metasearch. But we remain hopeful that the service continues to add features that make it more useful for ongoing tracking of social media topics and trends.
To try the service and see what people are saying right at this moment - like the current opinion on this service or this post - visit WhosTalkin.
Share
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Whostalkin is a great service for discovering where:
- your company isn't present yet = work to do
- your company name pops-up without knowing
We definitely will use it regularly.
We're using Social Mention. It does provide RSS feeds of the searches and basic api.
great review of whostalkin.
i used it a few days earlier and after reading your blog post reminded me of 1 general feature that should have been included before beta release.
1. Search Results Count
it is annoying that their is such great results but no way to quickly assess how many search results per category (or site) that is being generated.
hopefully this is in the works..
eZanga’s social network, HopOnThis.com has refreshed the way they distribute content, and added a way to build and maintain relationships along with expanding your online community. They reward registered users with points to use toward cash and prizes just for interacting on the site. Some of the ways to earn points are: updating a blog, inviting a friend, and adding a picture. They also offer features such as page personalization, drag-and-drop features, unlimited space for photos, and much more. HopOnThis offers a productive social experience, while adding to the strength of advertiser’s campaigns.
sounds like a good start, if inefficient for now...
You might to take a look at the higher end social media monitoring applications like ours, http://sm2.techrigy.com (free version available there) . Social search requires a very different set of tools than conventional web search. The free services you mention are inherently limited to what they can find in real time, similar to using Google Alerts.
The linkability of the URL is just a matter of switching the POST method on the search form to GET, which can be done through the Web Developer Toolbar. For instance, here's the search URL for lifehacker:
http://www.whostalkin.com/viewer.php?q=lifehacker&button=Search
Doing that, I wasn't able to fetch the page in Yahoo! Pipes, but Dapper seemed to start working, but I guess it got hung. At the very least, you can bookmark the page with the above URL format.
@Wayne Good to know! Thanks for taking the time to share that.
Rick,
Thanks so much for talking about WhosTalkin.com Just one small correction, we do offer dynamic URLs through our URL API. For example if you wanted to search for "cats" the url would be:
http://www.whostalkin.com/veiwer.php?q=cats
We are starting to talk a lot more about the line of WhosTalkin tools that are in development. Feel free to stop by our blog and check out our most recent post!
http://www.whostalkin.com/blog/beta-test/whats-to-come/
Thanks again!
awesome, but what about seo?