You’ve seen the twitter updates on the sidebar here, and you’ve seen my Introduction to Twitter post, but have you signed up and started using it yet? If not, I urge you to give it a try.
Once you do start using Twitter, one of your first questions will probably be how do you find other people with similar interests to follow and communicate with? Fortunately tracking and finding conversations on Twitter are very easy, with a number of third party tools available to do just that.
One of the most useful Twitter apps you’ll find – Summize is basically a search engine for Twitter.
Enter a search term that you’re interested in and Summize will return the latest tweets that contain that term. You can reply directly to any thing you see, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of your search (really handy if you want to track what other people are saying about you on Twitter) and there are advanced search options to further zero in on your target (you can even restrict it to people who live in your immediate area).
More of a conversation tracker, Quotably lets you input a Twitter username and groups threads of conversations together – it’s a quick way to follow all replies that come in when someone asks a question, even if you’re not subscribed to all the people answering it.
It’s becoming quite common on Twitter for people to use hash tags (putting ‘#’ before a keyword). Twemes provide an easy way to search for these hash tags and also rank which tags are the most popular (during the last 1hr, 24hrs, 7 days, 30 days or 1 year).
Twemes works really well if you want to follow a live event and those attending are using hashtags in their posts (a lot of tech conferences do this regularly).
Not really a conversation tracker, but Twits Like Me lets you search for other people to follow that share the same interests as you, I’m not 100% sure on how it finds a match, but part of the algorithm would look at who your friends are, and who their friends are etc.
Very similar to Twits Like Me, Twubble searches your friends graph and finds common people who are friends of your friends, but not yet being followed by you.
Twubble is an excellent way to find interesting people on Twitter once you’ve built up a few friends on your network, because it ranks them by the number of your friends who follow them, chances are good that the top recommendations have something good to say.
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