Using Summize to keep track of your own personal Twitterverse
One of the best things about Twitter is the ability to reply to people. The convention is that you use the @ symbol, followed by the person’s username that you’re responding to, followed by your comment. That allows others to see who you’re responding to, and is flattering and creates value for the original poster.
Keeping track of who is responding to you on Twitter can be a little bit challenging though. Twhirl, an application that I like a great deal, actually makes seeing who is replying to you quite easy, but I’ve simply found that using Twitter on the web is a little bit more manageable for me.
Therefore, I’ve created my own scenario where I’m “forced” to refresh my Twitter page on the web in the hope of “catching” those who may be responding to my comments. I follow more than 200 people now (not a lot for many, I realize, but quite a few for me!) so it’s pretty easy to miss out on who might be responding. Additionally, I’m literally blind to those replying to me who I am not following.
Now, there are currently a galaxy of Twitter-related services out there, many of which search Twitter or try to organize its organization, community, or interconnections in some way. I kept seeing Summize mentioned, however, so I decided to check it out.
I’m glad I did. Not only does it do a nice, clean job of providing search results, but it offers RSS feeds based on any search query. Therefore, what I’ve done is to plug the RSS feed for “@ebrage” replies (you can find my Twitter profile here by the way) into Google Reader. So now when someone replies to me, I’ll have a vastly better chance of knowing about.
This led me to think about all of the interesting things that you can do with Summize RSS feeds. Let’s say you’re really interested in what people are saying about the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, for instance. Plug in a search to Summize, grab the RSS feed, and you’re set. Extrapolate from there and the uses for researchers, the media, and marketing/PR folk are pretty enormous.
Update: Should mention that Twitter on the web actually does have a Replies tab, but it has often been pulled offline of late as the company deals with serious scaling issues. I sheepishly admit however that I almost always forget about it, though I’m on the site just about everyday.
