Phil Bradley's weblog

My library related Twitter lists

Twitter lists are a really powerful tool, but one that lots of people don't seem to know about. Basically you can add an account to a list that you create. You don't need to follow the person, but it's really easy to just add people when they start following you. Start off by going to https://twitter.com/your_name/followers and you'll see a list of people that are following you. Each person will be in their own little box with a 'Follow' option and next to that, 3 vertical dots. You can choose to follow the person (obviously) and you can also click on the 3 dots. This will give you an option of adding people to a list - 'Add or remove from lists'. 

If you click on this you may find absolutely nothing - this will be the case if you haven't set a list up yet. Simply choose the option to create a list and then call it whatever you would like to. For example, I have lists for 'UK Librarians', 'Search Engine accounts' 'Libraries' 'Friends' and so on. You can make the list publicly accessible or you can keep it private. Once you've set up a few of these lists you can then start adding people to them. One account can be added to multiple lists if so desired, so I'll quite often add someone to my UK librarians list and also my Schools library and librarians list as well. 

Unfortunately you can't just tweet TO a list, but you can see tweets FROM that list. That's really useful if you've spent the day being busy and just want to catch up on what a particular segment of the people that you've listed have been tweeting about. You can either do this directly from the Twitter interface or you can add lists to packages such as Hootsuite. Simply click on your avatar at Twitter.com and the second option will be 'Lists'. Click on that, see the lists you've got, click on one of them, and lo and behold - just tweets from the accounts on that list. 

Of course, you'll quite possibly be on some lists yourself. Click to go to your profile and in the top menu is a section called unsurprisingly 'Lists'. Click on that, then choose 'member of' and you'll see what you've been added to. What you can also do, which is very neat, is to subscribe to any of those lists or others that you find. This means that you don't have to actually follow all of those people - the list will appear in your own collection (though of course you can't add people to it since you don't own it), but you can then just see the tweets from the accounts on the list. So my UK librarians list currently has 1915 accounts on it and you can find it at https://twitter.com/Philbradley/lists/uk-librarians and if you want to, you can subscribe to it. It currently has over 300 subscribers - so this means that you can automatically see what these accounts are tweeting without having to follow them all. 

If you have any questions, do post them. However I'll try and answer a few before we start. You can create as many as you like, with as many members as you want. I do seem to recall a limit of 5,000 but I could be wrong on that. You can keep them private or public. I don't think you can force not being on a list, but of course you could ask the list owner to remove you. You're entirely free to add people, even if you're not following them. Your lists, your choice. 

I've got lots of lists - you can see them at https://twitter.com/Philbradley/lists/ and feel free to subscribe to and use any of them that you want to. The ones that might be of particular interest are:

UK Librarians and this is my guesstimate from people who follow me that they're a)library folk and b)based in the UK. I may be wrong on either or both counts!

School libraries and librarians is a list of school library accounts and school librarians where I've been able to identify them as such. Global in coverage.

Libraries from around the world which could be public, academic (university etc), specialist - anything except school.

Library Associations is a list of professional or voluntary groups that are obviously library related.

There are plenty of others, many of which won't interest you, but feel free to take a look. 

 

The hashtag search engine 'Hshtags' is closing down

Another interesting search engine is being shuttered. Hshtags at https://hshtags.com/ is closing down as of September 12th, which isn't exactly a long time away. The engine has been around for 3 years and was one of my favourites to point people towards when they wanted to search social media based material. It returned results in a nice 'tile' format and the coverage was wide, with Twitter, Facebook, G+, Instagram, Flickr etc all being searched. The only reason that they've given for the closure is "over time, the upkeep outweighed our passion." I think the lesson that we can take from that is that if an engine doesn't have a good money making structure behind it, naturally it will struggle. 

What are the alternatives?

There are several alternative engines that might fill in the gap, and Hshtags have suggested the following:

Tagboard which is an engine that I've used and it's worth looking at. 

Tint at http://www.tintup.com/ is a commercial product, with rates starting at $300, so I don't think many of us are going to be looking in their direction

Brandwatch at https://www.brandwatch.com/ is another priced product, and you have to request a demo as well, so for most librarians, once again that's not going to be appropriate. 

Talkwalker at http://www.talkwalker.com/ is another in the same vein.

Mention at https://mention.com/ is a great tool and one that I use myself. It's also free, which makes a change! 

Hashtags is the other obvious engine to look at, and you can find it at https://www.hashtags.org/ and it's where I'd suggest that you start exploring first. 

Renoun; a new social media search engine.

Renoun is very new onto the scene and hasn't yet left beta. It's a Twitter based search engine, and although I've seen comparisons to Topsy, (RIP) I think it's rather different. You start by discovering new content. The results page is in the fairly common tile/magazine format that we see so often these days:

and you can click on any of the tiles to get more information as to how often the story has been shared, and across which social media platform:

You can also click directly onto any of the links and share it yourself. Search results can be filtered by time - 6 months, 3 months, 2 weeks or 'now'. You can also check out a list of influencers, which seems to be a list of people who talk about the subject arranged in follower # which is a bit limited and clunky, but it could be helpful in some circumstances. A list of publishers is also only a click away and if you click on either a publisher or an influencer you can then get more information about them directly as well, so if you're looking for experts in a particular area, this is a good tool to help identify them. 

It's a nice engine, and worth taking a look at. 

People search on Facebook

A couple of easy ways to search for people on Facebook, without even having to log in. There's the Facebook People Search page which allows you to search for people by name, or to browse for your friends alphabetically by name. 

Alternatively, you can try out the Facebook directory which lists people by name, and is rather slow.

Unfortunately, you then need to click on each name until you find the one that you want. Not too bad if you are looking for me - there's only 24 of us (though you might also need to try Philip Bradley as well!) but it's less than useful when you're looking for John Smith. 

Alternatively, you could just go to your friendly search engine and search for "site:facebook.com their name" (without quotes) and then add in a few more keywords to try and narrow down the list to the person that you want. 

Facebook set to dramatically improve search

I saw an article in TechCrunch that says "Facebook expands search to all 2 trillion posts, surfacing public real-time news." Now, I haven't been able to try this yet, and it doesn't really seem to have been rolled out yet (as and when it is, it will most likely be available to people who have the language set as US English first, which is the way Facebook generally does stuff) but there are a huge number of implications for search. 

News. Clearly this is going to be really important; anything that's published to 'public' is going to be searchable. Facebook is already taking on Google news and other news outlets with trending information, and this is going to be another body blow to those sources. It's going to be particularly important to take into account authority and validity, but Facebook seems to have that covered - I'll discuss more below. I will be interested to see just how many people change their posting style to make things generally available to everyone, not just their contacts. If you want to be taken seriously on Facebook its something that you might want to consider - certainly if you're an expert in a particular area. Does that mean that we'll have to come to grips more closely with the groups that we post to, or will people be inclined to create second accounts?

If all those trillions of posts are searchable, are people more likely to start a search on Facebook, than they are on traditional search? I suspect that it's going to be depend on the way that they use Facebook at the moment - if it's open as a tab, then it's going to become a tempting prospect. 

Web V People. This is something that I talk about a lot - Google is great at sending you to pages, not so great at identifying people. This is the real strength that Facebook will have; identifying experts. Are you going to trust them more than a webpage? Are you going to spend time attempting to be seen as an expert yourself?

Corporate use of Facebook. I am often told that people can't access Facebook at work. With a serious change to search, that surely has to be addressed in the future. How much longer can a resource that's used daily by a billion people be ignored? What happens when the Facebook page is as important - or more important - than the website? How will corporations really address the fact that anyone can post stuff about them quickly and easily AND that it can be found by anyone else?

OMG, what did I post? This is going to raise its head even higher in the future, and there will be a whole rash of posts talking about ways in which you can increase your privacy, and check back through your timeline. It's going to be interesting to see what happens when on one side you have a huge increase in the availability of content, and on the other, people desperate to close it down. 

What is Facebook search going to look like in the future? I'm guessing that at this stage, no-one is quite sure. Facebook has been playing around with search for a while now. They really expanded it out to Graph Search with all of the different filters, then they pulled back on that again. This new version would (according to the TC source I linked to) have suggestions for keywords you could search on, personalisation, giving you results that your friends or their friends have talked about in posts, the normal groups/pages content, trusted news sources, popular posts (maybe those that have been liked, commented and shared) and 'other' results that Facebook thinks you'll like.

As a result I think we're going to get even MORE spam, hoaxes and general rubbish on Facebook. As a profession we are going to have to get to grips with Facebook search as much, or even more than we do with traditional search, in order to assist our library members. 

However, much of this is simply conjecture at the moment, but rest assured, it's something that I'll be keeping a close eye on and will be blogging about in the future!

Searching for tweets

Google is indexing tweets once again. You may have heard about this recently; Twitter and Google had a bit of a falling out a few years back, but they've since made up and they're now BFFs. This agreement was launched in February of this year, and the new service started on May 19th.  However, if you're looking to search Google to find tweets now, don't expect too much. StoneTemple has run a study to see exactly how much Google has indexed and is returning in searches and it's a rather lowly 3.4% of tweets. Those tweets that they are sharing in search are generally from what they would regard as influencers, people with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. Great if you want to keep in touch with current pop culture and which celebrity is rowing with which other one, but for the rest of us, it's a bit 'meh'. Google may increase the percentage of tweets that they index, but with 500 million per day, it's a fairly large amount of data to swallow, even for Google. Suffice to say, if you need to search Twitter, Google isn't going to be your best bet at the moment.

So what can you use instead? The obvious answer is Twitter itself; they've recently ramped up the amount of their own material that they index - it used to be limited to about a week, but it's getting better. However, my preferred option is still Topsy,  which indexes over 425 billion tweets going back to when the service started. You can limit your search to tweets with links, tweets with video, with photographs or from influencers. I have always found it a far better interface than the clunky search offered by Twitter.

Social Searcher - a multi social network search engine

Searching for social media content isn’t something that is the easiest thing in the world to do. You have to decide what social media networks you want to look for, then find a search engine that is going to provide you with access to it. Then you have to decide on your next network and start the whole process again. That also presupposes that you know exactly which networks are available, and that’s not always straightforward. There are an increasing number of social media search engines available to searchers, but I have done a review of Social Searcher on my website at http://www.philb.com/socialsearcher.html

Finding people's locations via Twitter

Are you aware of the option in Twitter to geolocate your tweets? Basically, you can allow Twitter to work out where you are, and add that data to your tweet. This can be a very useful way to track a person down, especially if there's a search engine that will do the job for you. Well there is, and it's called Geosocial Footprint. It's very simple - just type in a twitter handle (doesn't have to be yours, it can be anyone's that you're interested in stalki.. er tracking.. er investigating.. er researching. Yes, Anyone you want to research) and the engine will check that persons last 200 tweets to see if there's any location data available. 

Here's an example of what the results may look like:

 

What you can then do is zoom into a particular tweet and see what was actually said. This is a really helpful tool to track people, see what they talk about where, but also to check your OWN account to see if you are perhaps being over generous with the amount of information that you're giving out to people without being aware of it. 

One quick point - it look me *ages* to find an account that this actually worked on. I tried mine, a few of my friends, some of the big celebrity accounts and got zero results. So if you don't find any examples, keep trying! Of course if you don't get any results for your own name, you're not sharing any location data.

Echosec - powerful social media geolocation search engine

If you're looking for social media information based around a specific area there are very few options available to you. You can use the Advanced Twitter search option, but of course that's limited to tweets. I've been playing around with an engine that I've just discovered called Echosec. The idea is very straightforward - choose the area that interests you by creating a square on the world map, and Echosec will then display the tweets and Flickr images that are from that area. You can also choose the time period that interests you as well.

This is a really useful tool if you need real time content from a particular place (great to keep right up to speed with a breaking story or event), you can get faster breaks on a story, so it's perfect if you're a journalist. There are two versions of the engine - the free one, which is limited to tweets and Flickr images, and the paid for version which increases the sources that you can view, such as video from YouTube.

There were a few disadvantages to the engine - the main one being that there didn't seem to be any sort of safe search filtering - I found a lot of adult/pornographic images that had been posted to twitter, and there didn't seem to be a way of not seeing them. I also got all of the tweets first, and then the images, so if I was after pictures that would have been more scrolling. However, I accept that you have to display material one way or another, but it would be nice to have the option. It wasn't possible to limit the results by using keywords either - this would be a real advantage, because you may only want to follow one type of story, and the ability to limit by hashtag would be very powerful. 

Those limitations aside, it's worth a look. 

Google Social Search

Want to search for social media content, but don't want to stray too far from Google? Then try the Google Social Media search tool, which by the way isn't by Google. It's from a site called Social Searcher, which is another social media search engine, but they've put together this really nice tool which uses Google to search for content in:

Facebook, Twitter, G+, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

You can choose any combination of searches or all of them if you prefer. You get a nice column set of results coming back to you.