Another great way to not miss those Twitter posts
I know…I know…another Twitter post. I’ll return to regular programming soon, I promise. I just thought I’d share another great way I discovered to find the posts I’m after quickly.
I’m a news junkie. After checking email, my next check is my RSS feeds. Once I’ve cleared email and my news feeds, I can move on to other business. I’ve been experimenting with Twitter’s search site, http://search.twitter.com. I use OutTwit regularly and it helps find the posts I need, but this is actually a pretty neat way to find things.
Let’s say I want to find posts from certain folks to make sure I didn’t miss any. By this I mean, yes, I use OutTwit but if I exit OutTwit or Outlook, stay disconnected for a few hours, say for a flight, then log back in, it doesn’t catch me up like email. It only pulls the most recent, and certainly not all posts for the last two or three hours. So, search.twitter.com to the rescue.
Back to my example. In this case, let’s say I want to find all of Rod’s posts or Reed’s posts. Using Twitter’s search terms, I enter below:
Once I click the Search button, it will display all of the posts from Reed or from Rod. But, here’s the neat trick:
Once I’ve completed the search, notice the links in the right hand column. One of the links is “Feed for this query”. What will this do? That’s right, it will create an RSS feed for the search query just created that can be inserted in to your news reader. It’s just a matter of copying and pasting the shortcut in to the news reader. As I’ve posted before, Twitter has some great advanced search features, and after each search, you can create feeds for your news reader. When you launch your newsreader the next time, it will read the RSS feed and display the posts. Since I’ve started doing this for posts I don’t want to miss, I catch them since I’m already checking RSS feeds. So, if I want to stay caught up with what @lancearmstrong, or @levarburton, or @jerryrice have been up to, yep, I create a search and drop it in to my newsfeeds.
Once they’ve downloaded to my news reader, there’s an option obviously to view the link. Once you click the link, you’re taken to the actual post to reply, retweet, view, and all of the other options. Some readers, like Snarfer, actually have a Twitter add-in that allow you to post directly from the news reader. It’s not pretty, no, but it’s a great way to stay caught up with folks, even if you don’t have your favorite Twitter client loaded all the time.