Twitter Freaks

Twitter's default search only goes back a week-if that-and often chokes on multiple keyword searches. Fortunately, there ARE many great alternatives, and I've included a chart comparing the nine top tweet search engines below. Here are links to each of the nine,  in order of what I've found most useful to least useful for general tweet searches (however, some are powerful in other ways)):

Twitter is launching an official Tweet Button for sharing articles on websites and counting how many times a URL has been shared, according to documents Mashable has obtained. The Tweet Button could launch as soon as this Thursday.\n\n

BlastFollow enables you to follow Twitter users who share your interests en masse. This web site is a production of Triangle Information Solutions. To use BlastFollow, simply enter a favorite hashtag (for example, "americanidol") in the box below. Then, click the "Get Users!" button. After a few seconds, you will see the number of users who tweeted with that hashtag recently. Then, you need only enter your Twitter name and password and click "Blast!" You will start following all of those users. You can usually see the progress on a user-by-user basis.

Tips for using twitter in education

[academhack] "I must admit that when I first heard about Twitter I thought it represented the apex of what concerns me about internet technology: solipsism and sound-bite communication. While I obviously spend a great deal of time online and thinking about the potential of these new networked digital communication structures, I also worry about the way that they too easily lead to increasingly short space and time for conversation, cutting off nuance and conversation, and what is often worse how these conversations often reduce to self-centered statements. When I first heard about Twitter I thought, this was the example par excellence of these fears, so for many months I did not investigate it at all. Then I read an article by Clive Thompson at Wired. Clive's article convinced me that perhaps it was worth giving Twitter a try. At this point I have to say, I am so glad that I did. Although I am still beginning to wrap my head around all of its varied uses-I think for the most part Twitter users themselves are still figuring this out-I have been using it for over six months now and come up with some academic uses." (...)

Real-time presonalized newspaper generated from your twitter account. Does require that you give up credentials.

the homepage for Twitoaster conversation service - I'm taking a look at this. Still loving hootsuite but sometimes conversations can be hard to follow there.