Video of Tweet Scan

Just saw this cool video today from Robert Scoble's feed on Qik. He talks about how he uses Twitter and Tweet Scan(2:22) so look, listen and learn. Robert mentions searching: Microsoft, Scobleizer, Winer, and retweet.

Search by date

"History, history is laughing at us, plotting its discovery, victory, victory, blame it on the victory." - Bad Religion

Today marks the first day where all previously collected tweets are available online. You can search back in time by clicking on the "just now" field and choosing a date from the calendar. You can also type the date in YYYY-MM-DD format if you prefer the keyboard which we often do.

Why is this useful? You might be doing a report for a client and want to judge consumer sentiment before and after launch of the new site. Or perhaps you remember a friend said something cool but it was so far back that paging through your archives is impractical. Maybe you're just a historian trying to help us all avoid repeating our mistakes.

This is a new feature and there may be bugs so please do tweet about them including the word "tweetscan" so we can log them, submit to code review, and finally to our implementation group to be rolled in with the next Tweet Scan service pack. ;)

Happy Scanning!

Redesign and Popular Searches

If you've visited the site in the last couple hours or if you helped test it yesterday, you are now seeing a redesign of the site. The previous interface was a hack, too spacious, and even we were getting tired of that green. Tweet Scan now takes up less space on the screen and uses strict(er) css for a standard layout no matter which browser you prefer.

Additionally, we wanted to put a new thingy(that's an accepted word now right?) on the page. Google has their Zeitgeist which is cool but having something that updates once a month or even once a week is glacial by Twitter standards. Our Popular Searches div updates once an hour and reflects some of the most popular searches of the last 24 hours.

Happy scanning!

The OR operator

In the quest to make our humble search engine the best it can be, we've implemented the OR operator in our search. So if you wanted to search for cats or dogs you can enter that as 'cats OR dogs'. If you want to do an OR between two exact phrases or an exact phrase and a single word, that should work too. For example 'cats OR "big dogs"' will work as you'd expect. Note that the OR must be capitalized for it to work.

This updated functionality should work in RSS, on the site, and in Twhirl. If you have any comments or suggestions, let us know at @tweetscan OR right here in a comment.

Happy scanning!