Memolane is a site that can help organize your research if you frequently share links or research snippets on Twitter or other social media sites. I first heard about Memolane from the Advocate’s Studio but it took me awhile to look into it.
This is an aggregation tool. You tell Memolane which of your social media accounts you want to include and it goes out and grabs the content from your accounts. It can incorporate the obvious (Twitter, Facebook) and the less obvious (Vimeo, Foursquare) from the dozen or so services it supports. You approve of Memolane’s access to these accounts and it creates a visual display of the content. Memolane will also incorporate RSS feeds.
Google has shuttered its Twitter-oriented search focused search, known as Google Realtime. The search was helpful because it retrieved more results than the default Twitter search, and included a timeline. You could quickly move through, and change, the results by focusing on a particular time. This was helpful for business intelligence (finding a Tweet sent out chronologically near to an event) as well as being a useful filter. Search Engine Land reports that Google’s contract with Twitter ended. You can still search Twitter messages by using Google Social Search but it’s not nearly as powerful and retrieves far more cluttered results. You can focus the search on Twitter (add site:twitter.com to your search) but it does not retrieve all possible matches. A search on Twitter.com itself also has some strange limitations. You can scroll through all of the posts of an individual to find a message. I was able to scroll back through my own messages today, but when I chose an early one (late 2009 was early for me), the search term wouldn’t retrieve the message. I suppose I will be returning to my other Twitter archive tools, like Visitmix’s Archivist, as a way to capture information for future use. Perhaps this is just a lull before we start to see some new, interesting ways of mining social information again.
There are a number of search tools that will retrieve results from more than one location. Google is a great example, where the results display relevant images or even Youtube videos. Google Mail can search Google Docs and Google Sites at the same time. WebMynd expands those possibilities across other Web sites, search tools, and accounts to retrieve content from a variety of sources.
When you search using Google after installing their add-on, a small vertical bar will appear on the right side of your screen. It is populated with a variety of sites that can be searched, from news to shopping to personal productivity and social media.
Webmynd have developed free Web browser plug-ins for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari to enable the search bar. There is even a version for Microsoft Internet Explorer, but when I tried it, it was missing connections to some of the resources I would use the most, like Google Mail.
This is actually a custom search bar, geared as much to publishers who want to create their own tool for their users as Webmynd’s. In fact, the developers are focusing in other areas, so if you don’t see a resource that you can use out of the box or tweak, this probably isn’t something you want to follow up.
You can install the custom Webmynd search bar I created, utilizing many of the prebuilt sources from Webmynd (Google Mail, Docstoc, Quora, Twitter, etc.) and supplementing with my own law-related sites: a couple of the Legal Information Institutes, JDSupra, and so on. The Webmynd search bar works great if there is a single search box on the site you’re trying to use. If there isn’t, it seems to choke. Also, since most of the LIIs block indexing of their case law for privacy reasons, you are limited to legislative results. Likewise, Google Custom searches, even using search boxes anchored by domain names like Feefiefoefirm.com, weren’t usable.
Here’s what it looks like in action (4 minutes, Youtube.com)
Collecta is now completely gone, restructuring in a new direction. It was my favorite of the realtime search engines, pulling back Twitter messages and a variety of other social media resources. By all accounts, there are high expectations for what their return will bring, based on the success of the original.
Google has renamed its Twitter-oriented search from Updates to Realtime, which makes sense. When you search Google, you can select Realtime from the left hand menu (sometimes it is hidden even when there are matches) and it will display matching Twitter messages (tweets). The results have been reformatted, so now you have the timeline broken out to the right with the search results running down the middle of the page.
Topsy is a nice alternative to Google, enabling you to display bunches of results based on time – past day, 10 days, month, year, etc. – and search results represent more than just the text of the tweets. If a message linked to another page, you get that link, not the shortened link, to follow.
It looks like realtime search, such as it is, remains primarily an alternative way to search Twitter. Here’s hoping that whatever Collecta comes up wiith, it focuses on realtime!
