Twitter messaging: the awkwardness of being found out

I found out about Twitter search from Seth Godin’s blog. I had been shooting the breeze with Twitterfox before that. In blissful ignorance, I was oblivious of the existence of the twitter.com sub-domain, with a search prompt that allows anyone, Twitter member or not , to search through all public tweets using keywords in the age-old search engine style.

The search portal gives users advanced filtering similar to that of larger search engines, with ‘advanced search’ that allows one to specify date ranges, chosen sets of keywords, language, twitter members, referenced twitter members and location.

“This is pretty big”, I thought as I perused search results and discovered what people were saying about topics I had specified. I marvelled at the sheer bone-headedness of myself for not having ever really questioned if Twitter had had a search feature.

Sometimes, one just subconsciously decides that if something important happens on the internet, you will naturally discover it in headlines of your favourite industry news channels. I discovered Seth’s post a week or so ago, but I get the feeling Twitter’s search portal has been around for a while longer.

“If you use twitter, remember that what you say is not just seen by your few followers. It’s seen by anyone who searches.”

Thank you Seth, that is an apt warning. In the Web 2.0 era, we should all be careful of what we say. Five years ago, the only thing available in search engines regarding my full name, was an old page about my grandfather (of the same name) giving renewed life to a flying club in Port Elizabeth, back in the 1940s.

Now if I google myself, I see my Facebook profile, articles I’ve submitted to ezines, my forum profiles, my blog posts and more. My grandfather still out-ranks my abundant volume of online content, but then that goes to show how Google gives more trust to older domains.

As an individual, if you don’t want to be seen, you have to go to lengths to ensure your profiles on various websites are anonymous, or your information is well concealed behind encryptions and passwords; otherwise anyone researching you could find enough information to build quite a picture of who you are and what you are up to.

Since Twitter has established a user base of over 2 million, their database of messages or “tweets” has grown quite large. Because of this, one can use the search feature to see what average people are saying about a brand, product or service. It can be used as a tool to detect negative comments about a given company, so that PR professionals know when and where to respond. In other words, it’s a reasonable reputation management channel.

A given query’s results can be subscribed to in an RSS feed in much the same way as one might subscribe to Google or Yahoo alerts for regular index updates.

Twitter is growing, and it’s wonderfully half instant-messaging / half social networking style ‘TwitterFox browser plug-in application’ is an important factor in pushing its popularity ahead. I will definitely use the search feature in the near future to look up goodies related to my clients, as well as other interests.