Understanding the meaning of tags » twitter

OneRiot’s Twitter-based search engine

arkaitz — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 09:42:16 +0000

OneRiot, the real-time search engine relying on what is people buzzing right now on the web, has recently launched a Twitter-based search engine. Twitter is an appropriate way to share links with your friends, and users often use it to make a brief comment on a link.

Unlike Twitter’s own search engine, where the tweets containing the search term(s) are shown as a result, OneRiot’s Twitter searcher goes further. When you type and submit a search term in this engine, it returns interesting links (that users have shared on Twitter) about that search term. When selecting what links to show you as a result, the system bases on what have users said about them in the corresponding tweets.

Look, for instance, for a search on readwriteweb. Numerous links pointing to this well-known site are returned. For each of these links, you can know how many tweets have talked about it. Moreover, if you click over this info, a summary of these tweets is shown: what has been the latest conversation on that link, and who discovered (first-tweeted) the link. Note that apparently some tweets point to different links, since they are usually tinyurl’d or somewhat. Another interesting way to search over tweets

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Twitscoop: Twitter-based term cloud

arkaitz — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 10:37:15 +0000

The success of tag clouds has emerged on the use of clouds for diverse purposes, not only including tags. Twitscoop is an interesting tool, where recent activity on Twitter is empashized by means of a cloud, composed by terms. So, we can name it a term cloud rather than a tag cloud, since it does not include tags.

Twitscoop allows to discover what is being published (or twitted) right now on Twitter and, moreover, it is updated constantly. On the other hand, it shows a list of common terms for the last hours, showing the hot trends on Twitter.

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#hashtags: Tag trends in Twitter

arkaitz — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:16:11 +0000

Twitter has become a very popular means to share any kind of short message with your contacts. You can now stay tuned to whatever your friends and contacts share with you, and even receive these messages in your mobile phone. Twitter is a system for microblogging, the state-of-the-art for the blogging world.

The messages sent to Twitter also tend to be tagged by users, and so it’s easier to know what’s the sender talking about. Tags are identified in Twitter as those words preceding a # sign. For instance, in the message “It’s sunny today #weather #london” the tags determine the message is talking about the weather in London.

Taking advantage of the tags annotated by users in Twitter, #hashtags offers an easy and friendly interface to monitor the usage of a tag and discover its trend for the last month. For instance, the use of the tag #obama seems to be really variable.

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