Search This Blog

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Question of the Day: How to search your own tweets at twitter

So, this was MY question today: as in, I wanted to re-post a tweet about moonshine arts & literary magazine. I couldn't quite remember what I wrote and I didn't use a #hashtag. So what to do? How do you search your own twitter feed? There are lots of cool trending tools out there, but those are very limited in terms of timeframe. I personally like trendtastic.

Per my usual M.O. I tweeted, buzzed, & facebook'd my request --even before I google'd, now what does that tell ya? I tell you what it tells me -- I trust my networks of techies, artists, photographers, librarians, metadata mavens, programmers, hackers, writers, proj managers DIVAS -- the creme de cool , more than google for quick answers.

Here is what I tried BEFORE I tweeted my plea for help:

None of these achieved any results. Strange, no? Not even the advanced search feature was successful. I know that I can scroll back chronologically through my posts but that is a LOT of work.

Doesn't this seem like a huge failure on twitter's part? Surely there are times when people what to see something from a previous week or month...and how will that fit into the semantic web? If the semantic web is all about the data and finding relevant info, whoa... huge hole.

One answer
My friend and webgurl, Amy, tweeted back almost instantly:
set up an RSS feed for own tweets & search in Thunderbird.
Looking at it from the RSS angle, I pulled my twitter feed into google reader, but that pretty pretty much starts with today, so didn't help me find my moonshine arts tweet. I did find it using advanced search using friendfeed (yeah, I have an account there, too!), so big kudos to them. Good luck if you ever want to find anything in twitter or facebook. It's nearly impossible -- perhaps, this is where google buzz will score its biggest hit.
...and if I'm wrong and there is an easier way to do this, by ALL means, please let me know -- because I'm not the only one who wants to see what they have tweeted.

No comments: