DailyRT also allows you to save your searches, which is especially useful if you regularly search for the same terms.

One problem we noticed, though, was that dailyRT does not support the Boolean searches (AND, OR, etc.) that Twitter's own search engine offers. This takes at least some of the usefulness out of the service's advanced search features. (Update: DailyRT's Chris Williams tells us that Boolean searches are coming tonight).

We'd love to see a service that, in addition to dailyRT's advanced search features, would also add some of the personalization that a custom memetracker like MicroPlaza offers. But, for now, we'll have to do with dailyRT's advance search which is already a great step forward.

Channels

In addition to these real-time streams, Tweetmeme is also focusing on providing channels about specific topics including this one for Earth Day, for example. Thanks to this, it might soon be a lot easier to filter out the noise during a big conference, for example, where it is usually impossible to keep distinguishing between high-value tweets and random invitations for lunch.

Sadly, these channels don't yet feature the new live streams, which is really a shame. It would also be great if we could create custom channels based on keyword searches that are then filtered by Tweetmeme, and presented in a real-time stream. We can't imagine, however, that the Tweetmeme team isn't working on something like this already (and maybe even implementing real-time updates in the mobile version as well).

Tweetmeme's backend is sponsored by Sun through the company's Startup Essentials program. The company also has an interesting business model, and it features some interesting leaderboards and stats about every item.

Twitter and Real-Time: A Marriage Made in Heaven

Twitter and  real-time clearly go hand-in-hand. Just in the last few weeks, we saw the launch of two new real-time Twitter search engines, Twazzup (our review) and Tweetmi, and, of course, there is also Monitter, the grandfather of Twitter real-time services. Tweetmeme's new real-time stream looks like a great compliment to those, and from what we've heard, the team still has a lot of great ideas about how to make the service even better.

Thanks to Marjolein Hoekstra (@cleverclogs) for alerting us to this new feature.

Two common ways that have developed are link tracking and meme tracking. In the first case, it's fairly simple - just take all the URLs posted on Twitter, uncompress them if necessary, add up the uniques, and sort them by popularity. But today we are going to focus on the latter case, services that look for a specific keyword, topic, or hashtag (all falling under the fuzzy category of meme or viral idea) and cluster related tweets together.

There are two types of topic trackers out there: List and waterfall. The first category (and first four on our list) are basically search engines for Twitter keywords, perhaps with a little extra thrown in. The second category is very much as it sounds - real-time Twitter results that flow down the screen like a waterfall.

Tweetizen

Tweetizen (sounds like citizen) is a relatively new discovery that was brought to my attention via a comment on my Tinker post. Tweetizen has a lot of power hidden behind its simple facade. There are two main types of groups that you can create, friends and interests. Friend groups are just that: friend groups. Add a bunch of your Twitter friends' nicknames here and generate an instant stream with just their updates. Very nice!

Interest groups are more complex, they are similar to, but more powerful (in some ways) than Tinker, which we covered here. You can start out by giving your new group a name, and then choose any combinations of keywords to search for. The real power here is anything you enter here gets passed directly through to the Twitter search API. So, if you want to search for #followfriday, but only see tweets including the word 'Saturday', use Saturday as your search term, and #followfriday as your tag term. Then, go to advanced options and select 'use all of these tags & text'. You can also remove keywords from your search results by putting a minus (-) in front of the term. As a demonstration, I constructed this simple group as an example: FollowFriday Saturday. I'll leave experimenting with other Twitter search terms (like from:) as an exercise for the reader to try.

Some other great features of Tweetizen are; the ability to embed groups on external web pages, using Twitter OAuth to be able to directly create or reply to tweets in a group you've made, a live refresh option, and extra filtering options to remove tweets without URLs and retweets.

Twitscoop

Twitscoop is a clever site that shows a constantly-updating cloud of popular terms (although not necessarily hashtags) that you can click on to get some more details. You can also grab a widget that creates a new cloud every time it is refreshed. Finally, there is trend tracking that gives you a constantly-refreshing list based on username, tag or keyword, plus a little graph on the popularity of the search term over time. An expanded view of search results is also available, like this one.

TweetChannel

TweetChannel is a very clean site that is similar to Tinker in that it attempts to link a user's login with certain hashtag topics. In order to create your own channel, you must provide your Twitter login and password, which causes you to automatically start following a Twitter user @tweet_channel. This is the listener account for the service. Once logged in, you can create your own hashtag-based channel and any subsequent tweets you send out with that hashtag will show up in TweetChannel, under that channel. You can then grab an RSS feed of anything from that channel (or any other channel registered in the service). For example, you can check out the #sandbox channel.

Tweetscan

Tweetscan is the only application in this round-up with a subscription fee. But after we tell you some of its features, you may find subscribing worthwhile. Its unassuming front page offers a trending topic cloud that you can click on to bring up a quick search result, or you can use the search bar. Once search results are up, you will notice some unusual refinements; first is choice of service! Yes, Tweetscan supports identi.ca. You can also narrow results by user, and grab an RSS feed of any search, even tweet your custom search link. Example #followfriday search here.

Additionally, Tweetscan offers the paying customer the ability to download any search result as a CSV (comma separated value) file, suitable for import into a spreadsheet or database application, as well as sending regular search result updates via email. Also, Tweetscan has a separate portal specifically for searching user profiles! We are actually fairly impressed with this tool, it is trying to bring more to the table in exchange for a small subscription fee.

Twistori

Twistori (not to be confused with Twistory, which lets you add tweets to a calendar) is one of the original Twitter meme waterfalls. It is based on an infographic art project by Jonathan Harris called We Feel Fine, and its mission is very straightforward: You can choose from 6 verbs that show up quite commonly on Twitter, and once chosen, you get a reverse waterfall highlighting recent, anonymous tweets containing a personal use of that verb. Very zen and relaxing, but more art that function.

Extra features include a mac screensaver version and a custom mac application.

Twitterfall

Twitterfall is basically where twitterers go after they watch Twistori for a while and want a tool they can use to make their own custom waterfalls. Twitterfall supports searching for keywords and hashtags, and will support additional search parameters like the minus to exclude terms (mentioned above) and the from: operator to limit tweets from a single account. You can see my FollowFriday Saturday example here.

All the parameters for your waterfall experience are adjustable, from the background color theme to the appearance speed of new tweets. You can log in via Twitter OAuth (although that didn't work for me, it falls back to a traditional login prompt) in order to perform operations on tweets in the waterfall, such as replying and retweeting. The waterfall helpfully pauses if you hover over a tweet. You can limit search results to a specific geographic region.

There are also widgets for the Mac and Windows desktop but no javascript embed or RSS output, which is unfortunate. Although, you can save your custom searches if you log in.

Monitter

Monitter takes the Twitterfall concept a step further by giving you not one but three fully-customizable keyword search waterfalls that are constantly updated with recent tweets. Each search, like with Tweetizen and Twitterfall, is passed directly to the search API so you can add advanced parameters to fine-tune your results. There is also support for regional tweets, although it looks like imposing a region affects every column, which may be overkill.

Monitter pipes Twitter search results directly back out into the columns in a waterfall format. Oddly, the RSS icons link directly to Twitter search query results. Also, there doesn't seem to be any way of sharing columns with other people. I did discover though that apparently the session is saved in a cookie so, you can feel safe leaving the page and returning to it later.

Extras include the ability to add or remove columns and a customizable jquery widget that, with a bit of PHP programming skill, you can add to your blog's web page.

A final note we would like to mention about Monitter: It seems to like Chrome a lot more than Firefox. It may just be my setup, but as a warning, your mileage may vary.

Honorable Mentions

There are a number of very similar web apps, which I am calling "Twitter search front-ends," that all replicate the same functionality in slightly different ways:

1. Twendz: Created by marketing firm Waggener Edstrom, Twendz is just a nice, clean Twitter search utility that supports a waterfall result and advanced search term constructions. Here is an example Followfriday search.
2. Tweetzi: No affiliation or creator name attached to this search, but it has the distinction of using the biggest Courier font we've ever seen plus the ability to filter by mood. Good stuff. Example search here.
3. Twemes: Twemes is one of the few web sites we looked at that doesn't seem to use the Twitter search API directly. Unfortunately, as a result it is extremely slow on certain searches. It does have a couple of unusual features but the interface and responsiveness get in the way of this being a useful tool.

Finally, we would like to give a shout out to Birdsall's Massive Twitter Sites & Tools Directory page that made finding these apps much less of a chore than it could have been.

In many ways, MicroPlaza is similar to Techmeme. But while Techmeme is built on top of RSS feeds and blogs, and derives its rankings from the link behavior of the listed blogs, MicroPlaza tracks your Twitter friends and the sites and stories they link to.

You can see the public timeline on MicroPlaza's home page, but the real power of the service is in its individualized pages.

The memetracker/link aggregator will display the most popular items within your network, but it will also display tweets from Twitter users that you don't follow yet, which makes this a great way of discovering new people to follow on Twitter.

Another cool aspect of MicroPlaza is that it allows you to see what MicroPlaza would look like for any other Twitter user. Thanks to this 'being' feature, you can easily see what's hot in somebody else's network.

Tribes

The idea of organizing your Twitter friends into different tribes is great (just think about how useful the 'Group' feature in TweetDeck is), though this is also the only area where MicroPlaza's execution is somewhat less than ideal. If you follow a lot of users, grouping them can become rather tedious, as you can only see a few of your Twitter friends per page (up to 25), and finding them is hard, as they are not organized alphabetically. While this effort is definitely rewarded, we hope that MicroPlaza will find a way to make this feature a bit easier to use in the future.

Retweeting

MicroPlaza, of course, also makes retweeting an even more important aspect of the Twitter ecosystem. This, however, can also bias your stream if you follow users who are being retweeted frequently. To avoid this, it would be nice if MicroPlaza allowed you to block certain users.

Verdict

MicroPlaza is a very interesting and well designed service (except for the problem with the 'tribes' feature we mentioned above). If you follow a lot of users on Twitter, it is almost impossible to keep up with the discussions. Unless you are constantly looking at your Twitter stream, you inevitably miss out on some great links and stories. General Twitter memetrackers like TwitScoop are great if you want to get a feeling for what the hot topics on Twitter in general are, but thanks to MicroPlaza, you can now get a more personalized and relevant view of the stories and links that are being passed around in your own network.

MicroPlaza has promised to send us a number of beta invites in the course of the week. Just send an email to 'microplaza AT frederic.otherinbox.com' and we will send one to you as soon as we get them.

If you would like to follow us on Twitter, here is a list with the accounts of all of our writers.