Lets cut out the middle man. Let’s cut out RedMonk. I hereby declare myself obsolete.
For those of you that read monkchips on a regular basis I am sure you’re fed up to the back teeth of hearing about Twitter. I riff about it a lot. But its very useful. Today it just became a whole lot more useful. A guy called David Sterry built an app called Tweetscan – which allows you to search across as public Twitter messages.
Say, for example, you wanted to know: who is actually using Erlang (the new hotness among the developer cognoscenti, a programming language designed for concurrent processor architectures, based on message passing, enabling powerful pattern matching capabilities, invented at Ericcson for network use) in production? Well you could ask RedMonk or…
head over to
and see this:
So we know Jens Ohlig is the guy. In other words not only do we now know someone using Erlang in anger, but we can… talk to him. If you want to know a company making lots of money with an Erlang RedMonk would say Kreditor.
But this isn’t really supposed to be a dorky post. Any marketer or community manager should find it easy enough to head to tweetscan and find people talking about their customers and competitors.
The information is out there, about what people are doing, saying, and using. Its ours to harvest. The title of this blog is a tongue in cheek hopefully, because the fact is tools like tweetscan make us far more powerful, extending our reach, allowing us into new conversations, making us smarter, and allowing us to test ideas in near real time. A database of conversations. A database of intentions. Its all coming together. 2008 is going to rock.
blog family tree (via): David left a comment on a Rafe Needleman How To Use Twitter post. I came across that link by following a tweet from Jeremiah Owyang.
Matt says:
November 30, 2007 at 4:16 pm
link?
Jake says:
November 30, 2007 at 5:01 pm
To your point, I used Tweet Scan right after we launched Mix at OpenWorld to see who was using it and view the chatter. Then, I went back again this week to view momentum.
Great little tool.
/pd says:
November 30, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Not sure what the big deal on this one .. I use
a) Google Desk top
b) Added the Twitter Public RSS into GDS Clips
c) use GDS searchlet with “SearchDesktop” option
d) enter Search term and sure enough you will be returned results if its beeen twitted !!
is that the same as the tweetscan as user hack or not ??
Andy Piper says:
November 30, 2007 at 5:18 pm
I agree, I love TweetScan – I found it a week or so ago and bookmarked it and another Twitter search engine on del.icio.us.
It does work very nicely. It is also a handy way of seeing who has mentioned you, even if not in @replies (or, in @replies that you don’t see as you don’t have someone on your list). However, I’ve found that the daily or weekly email alerts just don’t work… even though a preview shows some results, the following morning when the email arrives, it is always empty. Bug, methinks.
Jeremiah Owyang says:
November 30, 2007 at 5:27 pm
Some who registered their twitter account with Technorati will also have results turn up there. I know for a fact that many PR firms are monitoring the Twittersphere.
Jonny Bentwood says:
November 30, 2007 at 5:48 pm
Absolutely great tool. With 254 different RSS feeds coming in, I quite like to have a special email that gives me a good summary of the conversations I like.
Thanks for pointing this one out.
Marshall Kirkpatrick says:
November 30, 2007 at 6:03 pm
there’s no rss feed. 🙁 am I supposed to do regular one-off searches? having looked at several twitter search engines, this one is nice, but it’s the one that gets all the results and offers a feed that will win, imho.
David Sterry says:
November 30, 2007 at 9:53 pm
@Andy I’ve reviewed the code and you’re absolutely right. It’ll be fixed before the next batch goes out.
Find that missing tweet at Michael Specht - discussions on HR and technology says:
December 3, 2007 at 7:17 am
[…] me to keep an eye on what is going on, well at least on Twitter. The tool is Tweet Scan (hat tip James Governor) that allows me to keep an eye on what is going on, without having to open […]
shel israel says:
December 9, 2007 at 9:32 pm
No matter how bold the tweet, no one could eliminate the need for Redmonk. It was good to finally put a face to the Monk.
links for 2007-12-14 « Technobabble 2.0 says:
December 14, 2007 at 7:26 am
[…] James Governor’s Monkchips » A powerful, free, buzz tracking tool: Eliminate The Need for RedMonk… Want to know who is taking part in conversations on Twitter – James has found a great tool that will email you the direct conversations between people (tags: twitter microblogging socialmedia) […]