Real Time and Social Media Search: Beyond Twitter

Posted on August 17, 2010 by David Whelan

Posted in Bing, Collecta, Google, Social media, Twitter | Tagged real-time, social

When social media is discussed, the same names come up as near synonyms for the concept: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Many of the search engines that are devoted to monitoring social media are similarly limited. Microsoft’s Bing Social Search and Google’s Update both return results from Twitter and nowhere else. My favorite real-time search, Collecta, returns results from the most obvious sites as well as other less known, and different types of content: blog comments, videos, etc.

Pandia Search Engine News did a nice round up yesterday of 6 real time search engines. They mention Collecta and a number of others. Not surprisingly, some of them are primarily Twitter search.

I won’t rehash the article, which is very helpful, but here are a couple of thoughts that might help lawyers. Topsy was new to me, since it is often filtered out by corporate Web filtering focused on social media. The results set is not particularly different from other Twitter searches, but they have a nice Expert feature. Click on the Expert link at the top, type in your search, and it will attempt to return a list of possible authorities, on Twitter, that match your keyword. This can help if you are using Twitter as a current awareness tool in finding people who are talking about your topic, and are well-regarded. The expert query appears to rely on how often the person’s content is mentioned.

Another that was new to me was 48ers. While not as extensive as Collecta, it aggregates results from Digg.com, Delicious.com bookmarks, and Google Buzz, as well as Facebook. Since these are different from those at Collecta, it would be a good complementary site if you are looking at something in real-time (give or take).

The other search tools seem to be powerful for Twitter results but not for mining much else. The article is a good sign that real-time search is popping up all over, and some of the Twitter-only sites like Leapfish.com are trying interesting things with presenting their real time results.

Bing Broadens Social Media Search

Posted on June 10, 2010 by David Whelan

Posted in Bing, Social media, Twitter | Tagged real-time, reputation, social

Whether you want to find more about a currently trending topic on the Web or learn what people are saying about you, social media is a great resource to mine. The trouble is applying search tools to it. Until now, the focus has been on Twitter, with both Bing’s initial search foray and Google’s Replay focused on showing real-time streams from that popular microblogging site.

Now Bing is expanding to the other major social media site, Facebook. This can be helpful since there is so much more activity on Facebook, more extensive content being added, and pages and profiles being auto generated by the Facebook system.

It is still limited – searching Twitter and Facebook is only a part, even a large part, of social content available on the Web – but it can be a great starting point.

Unfortunately, when I took a look at the search, it was down and they were trying to restart the service. Bing.com’s Twitter search did not pull up the same results as a Google search of Twitter posts. You may find that you still need to look in more than one location to find posts by a particular user (@davidpwhelan) or on a given topic, with the hash tag (#legalit).

The inclusion may be helpful if you are monitoring your online reputation or those of your clients, as you may find system-created content faster using a more comprehensive search than the tools available at a particular social media site.

[ReadWriteWeb: Facebook Firehose Comes to Bing]
[More from Microsoft]

Universal Inbox is Too Much of a Good Thing

Posted on May 14, 2010 by David Whelan

Posted in Add-on, E-mail Management, GMail, Outlook, Thunderbird, Twitter | Tagged aggregate, dashboard, social

I have been watching the news about the new Threadsy beta (see Lifehacker, GigaOm, and TechCrunch for specific coverage). If you are like me, you may have multiple communication flows and anything that can help you to pull them into a single interface can be great. Right now I use Mozilla’s Thunderbird to aggregate my e-mail. Each of my Google Mail and other accounts are set up using IMAP, so that I can access the account through a remote piece of software (Thunderbird in this case) and any changes I make (read a message, delete or move it) are reflected on the account.

There has been a lot written on the universal inbox (which I am using generically, not in reference to the Universal Inbox). The feature set tends to be the same, as is the requisite reference to The Lord of the Rings (“one ring to . . . ” you get the picture). The inbox aggregates the e-mail from multiple accounts into some type of dashboard or other simple interface. You can then manage many communications sources from one point.

As this piece at ReadWriteWeb indicates, though, the universal inbox is an oft-tried, rarely successful application. I agree with their perception: most people want to use their e-mail software, not some Web-based aggregation tool.

So back to Threadsy. I was intrigued because it offered not just to manage my e-mail (a problem) but also to weave in my Twitter stream (@davidpwhelan) so that my e-mails and Twitter messages were all in the same single flow. I registered for the beta and gave it a test. The application is promising but at the end of the day, it looks like it will face the same hurdles as other universal inboxes. The beta worked – and I understand that a beta isn’t perfect – and there didn’t appear to be anything that didn’t work as advertised or designed. But I still didn’t like the experience. Opening an e-mail message relies on IMAP, just like Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook can. The retrieval of the e-mail from Google took a surprising amount of time. I liked that I could see social information about my correspondent when the message opened. If you use Google Mail, you may already be using the Rapportive tool to replicate this feature, which shows a picture, full name, and other information if known through one of the social avatar sites.

Unlike client-based e-mail applications, the lumping of all accounts into one almost made the information flow worse. I lost some of the visual cues that helped me to triage my e-mail and lifestream. You can select to look at an individual e-mail account or Twitter feed, but only one at a time. It would be nice to be able to have a single tab for each communication stream that is aggregated in the unified view, similar to a faceted search on an e-commerce site. Then I could flip between unified and distinct sources, as needed.

At the end of my brief try at using Threadsy, I was reaffirmed that David Weinberger’s book title – Small Pieces, Loosely Joined – is the likely future for e-mail clients, among many other things. Whether you are using Microsoft Outlook with Xobni and other add-ons I mention in the text or Mozilla’s Thunderbird or some other installed or Web-based e-mail client like Google Mail, you have a far richer feature set than any of the universal inbox type tools, like Threadsy, can emulate. That is not to say they can’t or won’t in the future. The speed with which new add-ons for e-mail software comes out, though, means that a site building an aggregation environment is battling against very nimble, small application extensions that can do similar functions within an environment in which the user is already comfortable.

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