We’ve just added Twitter Search

Posted by Alex de Carvalho on Friday, August 15th, 2008

What a great first week! We’d like to thank everyone who signed up to the public Beta release.

As expected, some of you found some bugs, which we fixed as quickly as we could. There are still a couple of issues we’re aware of and which will take a bit longer to resolve. One of them is the +Buzz box, which we know we have to redo. Another is some funny stuff the CSS is doing, which we’ll be addressing.

We’ve also received lots of new ideas and great suggestions. We’ve documented all of them and will revisit them often as we plan out our development map. There’s some very exciting stuff we’d love to do.

But first things first: Twitter Search is now on!

We’ve been talking with the Twitter team to make sure we were complying with the correct use of their API, and we’re glad to say got the green light this afternoon!

What does this mean? In addition to mentions in blogs, you may now also track your mentions within the growing active and passionate Twitter community. Because Twitter is the most widely adopted micro-blogging and public messaging service, news often breaks there first. With its ease of use and brevity (tweets are limited to 140 characters), people run to Twitter with their good news … and their rants.

As Brian Solis, Principal of the PR agency Futureworks, describes:

“The crossroads of traditional PR and Social Media is on an inevitable path to a very public boiling point. In the realm of Social Media, conversations are king …. Twitter is one of the most powerful conversation tools among early adopters.”

The following screen shows what a persistent Twitter search in StartPR looks like. Shortly after we announced we turned Twitter Search on (bottom-most result below) this afternoon, we started seeing results for one of the topics we’re tracking, the keyword “StartPR” (the first three results below). Mentions in StartPR are listed in reverse chronology, with most recent results at the top:

20080816-dwh1gacqej9ykxugjjsa8ek88w Weve just added Twitter Search