More searches and better results

Today, we're pleased to announce more complete results and double the number saved searches! About a week ago, we started to supplement the results with those from Twitter's search engine and the response has been great. It's clear that our users appreciate getting every last tweet they can. Also today, we've increased the number of saved searches per account from 5 to 10.

That means you can track even more products, brands, clients, interests, hobbies, and funny phrases and you'll be less likely to miss the tweet that started the conversation. This is one of many incremental improvements we'll be making to the service as more people subscribe. We've reached 35% of our goal within 45 days so we're pleased with our progress so far. If you're still in your free trial or you let your free trial expire, login to subscribe today!

The Business Model

Tweet Scan is entering a new phase of becoming a sustainable business.

How do we plan to do that? First, to provide better service we will charge for an account. That will be followed by increased development in which we plan to cover more microblog networks in email alerts, offer more saved searches, increase search speed, and help you with the kinds of analysis you want to do. Any improvements we make will be available as part of your paid membership.

The cost is $15/year if you join or upgrade before April 23rd (with the early-adopter discount). On April 23rd, the fee will rise to a standard $20/year. If you do not upgrade your account by April 23rd, email alerts and access to the site will be suspended.

If you get already our daily email alerts, it's a great deal. If not, we urge you to join or upgrade today. Many of your colleagues are using Tweet Scan to stay aware of their brands, websites, and interests. You and they will benefit more as the service evolves.

Visit http://tweetscan.com/main.php to join or upgrade.

User Search

Looking for people to follow on Twitter? Not sure you want to follow based on a keyword used in an off-hand comment? Then try our new User Search! This searches the Twitter profiles we've indexed for their location, bio, and the beginning of the username. Give it a try and find some new folks to follow.

Once your done loading up on people to follow, join our site and get your free daily search emails started!

Happy Scanning.

Search Extended beyond Twitter and identi.ca

A while back, we added identi.ca messages or "dents" to our search index. It was and still is accessible at a second search page(tweetscan.com/identica). Since then, we've received requests that it be integrated to search both Twitter and identi.ca in one search result.

We've taken this idea a step further by integrating not just these two major Microblogging sites but also eight other Laconica based sites. These sites are in no particular order: bleeper.de, army.twit.tv, lareta.net, linuxoutlaws.net, sufficetosay.frontrowcrew.com, micro.ciarang.com, fun.ohhh.no, and pawwer.com. None of these gets the volume approaching Twitter at the moment but we think it's a great thing for the microblogging space to have them somehow unified in search.

For the moment, RSS doesn't do all these sites but you can do Twitter and identi.ca by visiting the API page to read about that. Also, if you know of another major site we should be indexing, feel free to comment or message @tweetscan or @weex.

Thanks,

David Sterry
http://tweetscan.com

2008 Debate #1 Twitter Statistics

The first Presidential debate of the 2008 Election started about 3 hours ago and since that time, we've captured 142,002 messages by 50,792 users from Twitter's public message stream. We present here the number of times some words of interest were mentioned during that time. For reference, the word "debate" was counted 12,460 times.



If you have any questions, feel free to add a comment. To follow future debates in real-time, bookmark this link.

Download Your Twitter Message Archive

We are very excited about a new product we released. You can now download your Twitter message archive consisting of any messages we've captured from our starting date of December 1st, 2007 to today. Just go to https://www.tweetscan.com/data.php to order. You can choose to download your messages alone or to include your replies as well. Only public messages we've previously captured are included in the database, though we believe it is the most comprehensive outside of Twitter itself.

We appreciate any suggestions you have to improve the service. Please email them to datasupport@tweetscan.com. If you are the first to come up with a suggestion and we choose to implement it, we will provide you with a complementary message archive with replies.

Thanks,

David Sterry
TweetScan.com

Ubiquity for Tweet Scan

Have you heard about Ubiquity? Mozilla's new plugin for Firefox adds a command line interface to their great web browser. Since Tweet Scan provides some web services, I thought I'd try my hand at creating a command to let people execute a search. To try it out, visit http://tweetscan.com/api.php and subscribe.

After installation, restart Firefox, invoke ubiquity and start typing 'tweetscan'('twe' is all you really need to type in a default install). Now, a Firefox restart isn't supposed to be required so if anyone knows how I can remove that step, I'm all ears.

Creating the command wasn't hard. All I did was take the 'echo' example from the author tutorial, use CmdUtils.getDocumentInsecure to grab the current tab, and set the document.location to the search url after escaping the search phrase. You can take a look at the code when you subscribe or by going to http://tweetscan.com/tweetscan.js.

This is the simplest command I could think of for Tweet Scan but I'll be looking for a way to extend this to make Tweet Scan useful for email and other creative contexts.

Happy Scanning,

David Sterry