Making Sense of Twitter with Topsy

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Twitter is big. Millions of people, companies and other organizations share tons of information through the service every day. A few years ago, several “real-time” search engines (eg: Collecta, OneRiot, Crowdeye, etc.) appeared to help people sort through the mountains of content. Now, only one of them is left standing – Topsy – and it recently achieved quite the milestone.

Topsy now claims to have indexed every single tweet from Twitter’s inception in 2006, totalling over 540 billion tweets according to the company. Topsy is getting a lot of attention now, including a recent piece on the New York Times’ website, as well as coverage from other industry observers.

What does this mean for you? Well, while it’s not perfect, Topsy will let you search Twitter for subjects that are important to you. Twitter’s search function is nice, but it’s algorithm sorts and filters results in a way that may not meet your needs. In fact, Twitter itself has used some of Topsy’s tools when publicly tracking major events on it’s service.

Here are a few things you can do with Topsy:

  1. Use search terms to track individual tweets or topics that may not be hashtagged.
  2. Get simple analytics around terms or keywords on Twitter.
  3. Refine Twitter searches to focus on certain types of media or particularly influential personalities.

Bottom line: you may not need an expensive social tracking solution to see what’s going on with Twitter. If your needs are simple, so is Topsy.