This is a new one on me - I don't know if anyone else has any other examples of this type of functionality, where you can get results of a search sent directly to your Twitter account. I was playing around with Ejeboo (next blog post down) which is a video search tool. Once you've run a search you are given the option of getting an RSS feed, an email alert or.. a Twitter alert.
Clicking on the Twitter Alert option results in:
It's not immediately apparent how this works, but after a bit of trial and error it seems that you have to type in your Twitter Page in the form of http://www.twitter.com/<twittername> although there didn't seem to be any sort of check, so it looks as though you could send these to anyone you fancied. If you were being hassled I guess you could put a block on though, but still, it's a slight flaw if my understanding is correct.
It's a neat idea though - being able to get real time updates to searches to your Twitter account. It's another example of using Twitter as a general interface to a lot of the things that you do on the web, and it's really bringing Twitter head on with RSS. This is important because there are still a lot of people who simply don't get the RSS concept, and the idea of setting up a reader and subscribing to feeds is alien to a lot of people. This simplifies the concept for a lot of people, and while you can already drag in feeds to Twitter if you know what you're doing, it's going to make it a lot easier for people if they just have to click on a 'Twitter alert' option.
How long will it be before other search engines follow this lead and give searchers the option to update results directly to Twitter? Given the way that Icerocket has made a lot of headway with Twitter already, my guess is that it's going to be them.
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