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September 25, 2007

Terraminds Twitter search channel hack

Filed under: blogs, conversation, mobile

Terraminds searches Twitter people or updates, also get an RSS feed.

What I like about this is that you can search for replies like @johnt, then subscribe to this RSS in your RSS Reader…the native Twitter reply feed is authenticated so this is an alternative for some RSS Readers.

You could hack a channel chat, based on hash tags I mentioned in my Twitter channels post

Just say I want to tag my tweet as “electronica”, I could have a tweet like this
eg. pulseprogramming is sweet #electronica

Actually the hash symbol is being ignored by Terraminds, so maybe you could use @electronica instead

Problem is there could already be a user called Twitter/electronica, and we wouldn’t want this user getting @electronica posts that we are tweeting, so we need another symbol to denote channels/tags, but Terraminds seems to be ignoring symbols, so perhaps a number will have to be used.
eg. 1electronica Qua’s old stuff is more guitar oriented
eg. Perth has an underground 1electronica scene

You and a bunch of users could search query 1electronica and grab the RSS feed.

Then convert this feed into email so you can follow it on your phone email.

In action

So you and some users have subscribed to a Terraminds Twitter search feed for “1electronica” and then converted it to email. Every time a tweet has the term “1electronica” you will receive a mobile email on the go.

Whenever you have the term “1electronica” in one of your tweets, users who subscribe to this search feed will be notified.

NOTE: I just searched for 1electronica and got no results, therefore no feed…so you have to at least have one post in order to establish a feed.

Now you and your friends can have conversations around the channel/tag “1electronica”, all without following someone, all people are doing is subscribing to a search feed.

If you want to see an archive of the conversation, do the search query at Terraminds, and you should see your search results as a chat hack.

Better still re-syndicate the feed to SuprGlu so the discussion has a place to live.
People wouldn’t even need to know Terraminds exists, they could follow your SuprGlu feed instead of the Terraminds feed, and you could use the sidebar to list regular posters to the channel, although this may be a bad idea as it’s not member based, anyone can post to this channel.

So with the power of search feeds we can have a conversation on the go and see the conversation archive in a search result or re-syndicated to a blog.

Conversation example

johnt: 1electronica when is the next issue of 1st past the post coming out

Since shaym subscribes to the search feed for “1electronica” he is notified of this post

shaym: 1electronica not sure but it sure beats any other magazine for the local scene

Since johnt subscribes to the search feed for “1electronica” he is notified of this post

johnt: 1electronica does anyone have back issues of 1st past the post

…and so on

Now the difficult thing is that what if you want to direct your conversation to one person but still appear in the channel, you could just use the @ symbol in your tweets as well…but this means you will sometimes see tweets twice, one in your search feed and one in your reply stream.

Why a channel name?

The reason we are using “1electronica” instead of “electronica” is that we don’t want noise in our search results.

eg. “1cars” would be a tweet channel about cars

a tweet like:
eg. I drove my car to the shop

….would not appear in the channel as we only want tweets that are intentionally about cars

OK, so maybe my example of “1electronica” was not a good example as the term “electronica” is pretty unique and always mostly used in the one context…it’s not very ambiguous or common.

But maybe you don’t want to see every tweet that has the term “electronica”, and only want to see tweets from people in the know of the term “1electronica”.
If you want a kind of closed group approach, just tell a bunch of friends about your unique term, you can tweet amongst yourselves…more like a conversation.
Sure, people that follow you will wonder why you always have the number 1 infront of a regular word in your tweets, and if they start doing it, their tweets will show up in the channel as well…it’s very open to spam and people contributing on the fly.

When you think of it, this is the same as an adhoc group based around a del.icio.us tag. People that want a type of closed group approach just choose a unique tag to share their links in.
If you collect links about electronic music you could tag it “electronica” for the good of the folksonomy, but also tag it “electronica1″.
All bookmarks in the “1electronica” tag are populated by people in the know, people who find out about this tag could start tagging this way (kind of like joining the group).

Anyway, for now I’m not creating a unique word as the term “electronica” is unique enough, and for this purpose I don’t care for a secret group.

So I’m gonna follow the Terraminds search results electronica, here’s the RSS feed.

This way I’ll know about any tweet with the term “electronica”, others who follow this search feed could ping back tweets like a conversation. Well they will be contributing anyway as long as they use the word “electronica”, but if some of their tweets are about “electronica” but they haven’t used the word “electronica” in their tweet then it won’t show up.

Again that’s why it’s important to choose a keyword as a channel name….I love it, following a adhoc topic instead of a user.

Following search feeds is a good way to find friends!

[ADDED: In the end, I could be the only one following the search feed “electronica”, if I see some cool tweets I can @reply to another user…even though we may not follow each other, they will still see my @reply tweet in their reply stream.]

Related:
Twitterment : search and trends for Twitter
Twitter word bursts: Twitterverse, Twitterzone, TwitterSearch, ZoomCloud

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