ReadWriteWeb

Back in October of 2009 both Google and Microsoft announced partnerships with Twitter to begin indexing the Twitter firehose, but what about all the tweets from before then? Twitter still has them in boxes in the attic, but isn't offering them up to search at this point. Thankfully a smaller independent search engine, Topsy, has been indexing (most) tweets since May of 2008, and now you can dive much deeper into Twitter's history than Google, Bing or even Twitter will allow.

Whether a website sells off your email address or forces you to install some pop-up plagued toolbar just to get 10% off your next online purchase, searching for online coupons can involve treading in dangerous waters. Enter CheapTweet, which uses both algorithms and crowdsourcing to verify its content, and suddenly looking for the best deals online isn't quite so scary.

The self-described "Twitter-based social deals search engine site" does precisely that

Many of you probably never heard of the Ellerdale project until this week, when Twitter announced it was one of the company's new partners in receiving the "firehose" of Twitter data, a full feed stream of tweets that was, prior to Monday, only available to the major players like Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft.

What Ellerdale is now doing with Twitter's 50 million tweets per day is definitely interesting - the service uses an intelligent data-parsing engine to analyze the context of tweets and the links they contain and combines that with other data sources like RSS feeds and Wikipedia to create a real-time search engine and trends tracker that provides more than just a list of tweets - it provides an understanding of the world's conversations.

During my career as a Web strategy consultant I've often had people ask me, "How do I do social media?" Unfortunately the answer isn't simple. But the first step is the same as if you developing any other marketing strategy: know your market. To "know your market" in the old days you needed a $15,000 qualitative market research study that would then need to be quantified for the likes of senior management. The customer research effort was time consuming and expensive.

Luckily the Web offers many ways to gather information on a topic and the conversation around that particular topic or product, in real-time. In fact we are spoiled, even overwhelmed, with free listening tools.

While Twitter offers a decent search experience, Twitter's own search engine doesn't make it very easy to discover interesting local Twitter users. LocaFollow wants to change this. The service offers an easy to use interface that makes it painless to find local Twitter users by searching through their Twitter bios. Once a search is completed, users are presented with a list of local Twitter users, their bios, a basic set of statistics and their latest tweets.

There are, of course, already numerous Twitter search engines at this point and every new one will have to offer users a very good reason to switch from their current favorite. Tweetmi is jumping into the fray with a Twitter search engine that focuses on presenting users with a more personalized view. While the service also works well as a regular real-time Twitter search engine, users who sign in to Tweetmi will also see the most active users in their Twitter stream and the top stories from the people they already follow.

Microsoft, in cooperation with Federated Media and Twitter, launched its own full-blown Twitter search engine today. BingTweets mashes up real-time Twitter search with results from Bing, Microsoft's new and increasingly popular search engine. The result is an interesting hybrid product that puts Bing's search results at the center of the experience, while the real-time Twitter feed appears in a sidebar on the left. The top of the page features a list of trending topics, which are quite interesting, as BingTweets separates them out by popular terms, as well as by popular people, places, and products.

We have seen our fair share of new Twitter search engines and memetrackers over the last few months, so in order to stand out, a new service definitely has to offer something special. DailyRT bills itself as a straightforward tweet aggregator, but in addition to tracking retweets in real-time, dailyRT also offers a number of advanced search functions that none of its competitors currently offer.

Twazzup, which just launched this morning, tries to bridge the gap between Twitter's real-time search and a more traditional search engine. While Twitter's real-time search is great for keeping an eye on current developments, it is not a great tool for seeing which links about a given topic are currently popular. On Twazzup, you can follow a real-time stream of updates including a certain keyword on the left, while the right sidebar shows the top tweets and a list of the top tweeted stories about this topic, as well as related photos from twitpic.

Auto-following is a sensitive topic on Twitter, and the release of TwitterMass is surely going to create some controversy, as it takes auto-following to the next level. TwitterMass is a clever tool that automates what many Twitter users are already doing: finding new Twitter users to follow by searching for keywords and then following the most interesting of these users. One twist here, however, is that TwitterMass also automatically unfollows users who don't follow you back within a few days. The point of this, of course, is to create a larger network of followers, which, because it is built on top of keyword and hashtag searches, should, at least in theory, be built on mutual interests.