Twitter is a messaging service that limits you to 140 characters just like an SMS does. This means that if you want to say something you have to get straight to the point and be concise, unlike a blog post like this where I could ramble forever. When Twitter started indexing the flow of messages so that they were searchable this opened the service to some pretty amazing possibilities.

I see Twitter as a collective consciousness, or a personal Google. When you ask Google a question it tells you where to go to find the answer. When you ask twitter a question you get a personal response from a human.

Think about the slight but powerful shift here – to appear in Google a person has to write their content on a webpage, but to appear on Twitter search all you have to do is have a conversation. People don’t need to be publishers to contribute to this latent knowledge sink, all they have to do is talk to their friends and post their status and the tools will do the rest.

Who is contributing?

There is some huge diversity on the site using it in a number of different ways, and that makes it really valuable. Here is a small sample of the people I follow:

@sammartino is the marketing guru and founder of rentoid.com.

@mark_hayward blogs and runs trainforhumanity.org.

@sandraarico is a graduate working at Deloitte Digital.

@stevemc1 is talking about spiral dynamics and levels of consciousness.

@craignewmark started craigslist.

@pierre is the founder of eBay.

@leawoodward is location independent.

@turnbullmalcolm is the Federal Opposition Leader in Australia.

@coliwilso runs movie nights and can always be found at @mtubs in melbourne.

@melbtransport is a bot with lots of bad news.

You can find more interesting people in the Top 100 Australian Twitterati list (I even snuck in!).

The internet enables the CheapEasyGlobal distribution of thought and Twitter really captures these conversations nicely.

Learn to search again

The librarian is back. These are the days where you can finish a degree at University without borrowing a single book because you know that if you type something semi-relevant into Google that you will get an answer. That’s nice, but I am learning to search again because knowing the nuances of how to search the knowledge of the cloud is how you find the good stuff.

I still use Google as a directory if I am looking for a company just like I use Facebook if I am looking for a person, but if I want to discover something new, see what is happening live at an event, or track the sentiment on a topic I dip into the collective consciousness at Twitter to find answers.

Let’s look at this subtle way to change your search. If I am looking for somewhere to go for dinner in St Kilda I can go to Google and type “restaurant st kilda” and I will get a bunch of listings but nothing particularly useful. If I go to Twitter Search though I will type in “great meal at” with a location filter for St Kilda. That will give me results like.

Here are a couple of different queries you can use to sample the consciousness from a few different perspectives.

Places

Try searching for your current location or a travel destination you are interested in.

• Melbourne
• Phuket
• London
• Paris
• New York

Events

Many events are joined together with #hashtags (a tag that you add to every message related to the event). Try looking on the popular list on the search homepage for something current, or try some old ones like

• #pubcamp
• #aflgf08
• #sxsw

Track conversations between people

I might be following @sandraarico which means I will see all of her tweets, but I want to see what other people are saying in reply (the good stuff) and that won’t appear in my stream. If I search for sandraarico though I will see both. I track quite a few people this way and it makes things much more interesting.

Snippets of conversation (using “”)

Think about some common phrases you use in conversation and try them.

• “great movie”
• “need”
• “it’s funny how”
• “world’s first”
• “RT”
• “imagine if”
• “fell on my ass”
• “looking for”

Location and link filters (filter:links)

The advanced search means you can add some interesting variants. Add location to see results focussed on a specific area, or use a link filter to only return results with links – this is basically google search results but from people.

• Recent links about poverty
• Recent links about twitter
• Tweets about ‘pizza’ near San Francisco
• Recent links about ‘cool’
• Recent links from @leawoodward

It is a very powerful beast and I am only just starting to understand its full potential – if you have anything to add or find any cool queries add them in the comments below.

By Ross Hill - October 27th, 2008 at 9:49am with 2,370 views - colin wilson craig newmark craigslist ebay facebook google lea woodward malcolm turnbull mark_hayward melbourne melbtransport pierre omidyar sandra arico st kilda steve mcdonald steve sammartino twitter