Twitter to Enhance Search? Something is Up.
Published by Rodney Rumford October 22nd, 2008 in twitter.
Is twitter enhancing their search functionality for finding people and their respective tweets? Lets sure hope so. The people search (not to be confused with search.twitter.com) has always been fairly flat and the results only marginally decent.
Twitter people search has been down for the last 8 hours. It is temporarily disabled, so something is happening. Twitter has a history of disabling services while enhancing or modifying portions of functionality or data sets. I am keeping my fingers crossed that they can bring some of the strong functionality from summize (whom they purchased a few months back) to the people search functionality area.
As twitter has experienced the increased value from Metcalfe’s law (Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system): the value from the increase in users has not been leveraged in the search area. This is a huge opportunity for twitter.
I want twitter to enhance their people search in the following ways:
1. allow me to search by real world name
2. allow me to search by email
3. allow me to search by keywords in the profile description
4. allow me to search and filter results of tweets based upon keyword.
5. allow me to search only my friends favorites by keyword
6. allow me to find people based upon location (city)
7. allow me some historical perspective to content of tweets
5 Responses to “Twitter to Enhance Search? Something is Up.”
- 1 Pingback on Nov 22nd, 2008 at 12:59 pm
- 2 Pingback on Dec 23rd, 2008 at 11:29 pm
I agree - it is a huge opportunity for Twitter - primarly because it’s such a glaring hole in the feature set. Nice to know I wasn’t the only one having a frustrating experience with this yesterday. I’ve actually move mostly to FriendFeed for “consumption” since most of the key people I follow are over there as well.
Rodney-I noticed that last night and wondered the same thing. If they provide us with half of the enhancements you suggest, I will be very happy. I guess we just have to stay tuned.
Here it is 2 days later and the service is still shut down. they are up to something. this is much longer than when they are fixing something. this is most likely going to be an enhanced area of functionality.