Storify. Scoop.it. Paper.li – Be a publisher. How to Mine Twitter for Information. Last week, I admitted that I am an information junkie, and I wanted to follow up this week with a few tips for feeding your information habit by mining Twitter for information.
Twitter tools are popping up like weeds lately, so rather than try to be comprehensive, I’m just going to highlight a few of my favorite tools for getting information out of Twitter. Twitter Search Twitter’s built-in search engine is probably my favorite way to find information in Twitter. It is great for quick searches to find specific pieces of information, watching trending topics, and persistent vanity searches for your name or company. While I do use the search engine to type in queries, the real power is in using RSS feeds for searches and running them through Yahoo Pipes for additional filtering. Twitter Stream Graphs I’m a big fan of getting data via RSS, but sometimes you just need a picture.
TweetVolume TweetVolume is a great tool for comparing the number of mentions across several keywords. Yahoo Pipes. How to Hack RSS to Reduce Information Overload. Last week, I held a session at SXSW Interactive titled Hacking RSS: Filtering & Processing Obscene Amounts of Information, where I talked about creative ways to use RSS to manage information overload without using any programming skills.
There is more information available in the world than any one person could hope to consume (hundreds of exabytes of data), but most of that information is uninteresting, out of date, inaccurate, or not relevant for you. The key to reducing information overload is to more efficiently find the data you want among the information that you don’t care about. The tools that I talked about in my SXSW session are focused on discarding or de-emphasizing the data you don’t need, while highlighting the data that’s relevant for you. I wanted to share some of what I talked about during my presentation. Individual RSS feeds from blogs, news and other sources are a great starting point for your information overload reduction efforts. How to hack an RSS feed from a Twitter hashtag. Creating RSS Feeds For Twitter.
Twitchimp.com - The ultimate Twitter List Curation Tool. Create, Curate, Search and Discover. Follow. Formulists One Ups Twitter's Topic Search with Filters, Lists. Twitter isn't the only company thinking about how to help users find accounts to follow according to interest. While the company announced yesterday that it had updated its search to do just that, today Twitter list-generating service Formulists announced a product of its own. Forumlists says that it will be "publicly incorporating the curating technology offered by Sulia to allow all users to create 'Topic Lists' - Twitter lists that will help users discover and engage experts on a specific topic of their choosing. " Formulists is a dynamic Twitter list creation service that builds Twitter lists according to a set of preset or user-defined variables. You can use it to create lists according to who you reply to, who unfollows you, who your friends talk to and other variables.
Sulia focuses on "filtering Twitter into compelling, high-quality content Channels from just the best experts. " How does this compare to Twitter's new and improved interest-based search? Tweety (email notifications) Dashboards. TweetDeck by Twitter. HootSuite. Social Media and News Dashboard with Analytics and Reporting.