Search giant Google rolled out two new Twitter products last week – Google Replay and Follow Finder. This is particularly interesting in light of Twitter’s recently revealed explosive growth. Just last week the Micro blogging platform disclosed it has 105 Million registered users growing at a rate of 300,000 users per day!
The first Google product, Replay, gives users the ability to search and explore the public archive of Tweets and to “replay” how a newsworthy event came to light. This is a continuation of Google’s recent move to make real-time search a part of its ever growing repertoire.
To try this out yourself: Click “Show options” on the search results page and select “Updates”. The first page shows you the latest updates from a large set of sources, including Twitter, Buzz and Facebook. However, at the top of the page a new addition to the real-time search family can be seen in the form of a chart depicting the relative volume of real-time traffic over a period of time. You can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period.
A search for “ipad” for April 2010 is shown below and one can clearly see the spike in traffic around 3 April, which is when the iPad launched.
The other product Google launched is a Google Labs project and called Follow Finder. It is a social network analysis tool that looks at a user’s social footprint and suggests people that they might be interested in following. Once you enter your Twitter user name and hit “Search”, Follow Finder presents you with two columns. On the left are “Tweeps you might like” and on the right “Tweeps with similar followers”.
In my experience I found the left column more useful as I am already following all the ‘suggestions’ made in the right hand column! However, some of the suggestions made in the left column were useful and led to me following two new tweeps.
All in all, these are two nice additions focusing on the currently exploding market of Twitter and real-time search. Considering the level of information overload experienced by the average, modern “knowledge worker”, any tool that helps one sift through and make sense of all the info is very welcome in my opinion. And I can see at least the real-time search and “replay” feature being a useful tool in the day-to-day arsenal of anyone interested in search trends and how news events came to light.
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