ttwick is a multisearch engine for social media content. It searches through a large number of sites, including Twitter, G+ Instagram, Facebook, Vine, Tumblr, Pinterest, YouTube and Vimeo, with the option of searching other sites as well. It's fairly straightforward - just type in what you're interested in, and ttwick will present you with various options (when I searched for my name I was given alternatives such as Author, Actor, Baseball player, porn star etc) and it then attempts to pull up content for you.
You start with a nice little bar chart of where it's found material:
If you click on the options such as Twitter it opens a new tab and runs the search there for you. Alternatively you can click on a little right facing icon to move through results, but I found this on the whole to be very poor - it was a series of large blocky images that I wasn't able to move around, so there were results that I could just about peep at, but couldn't properly see, which was irritating. Moreover, there seemed to be little sense in the way it was pulling up content for me - material from Amazon books was mixed in with unrelated video for example. I also wasn't impressed with the fact that video started playing automatically - this isn't going to help in an open plan office!
They did have a heat map however, which was quite useful, showing me where people had an interest in the subject that I was researching, and tiny links through to people who were talking about it in social media environments, which I found less helpful.
Is it valuable? I'd have to say not really. Sure, it's a great way to bring varied content together in one place, but it does a terrible job of doing so. Search was also limited - while I could search for 'Phil Bradley' it completely refused to look for @philbradley for example. Not something I'll be using myself, but obviously try it out, and see if it works for you. You have to request access at the moment, but it only took a couple of minutes for me to get an invite. Oh, and you have to type in the password character by character, don't cut and paste, because it indicates that you've done something wrong with your email address - again, very sloppy and a poor implimentation.
(Oh, and if you're wondering the name “ttwick” is derived from putting a social media “twist” on a market “tick.”)
Smashfuse is a basic, straightforward search engine which searches various different social media platforms, either individually or in combination. You can see the list in icon form:
If you're unfamiliar with all of the icons they are Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, Vimeo, Tumblr, Flickr, Instagram and Vine. The results are displayed in a cube like display:
This makes it quick to see what's immediately in front of you, but the disadvantage is that when you start to scroll it can be a little tedious and slow to catch up. If you search 'All' there really is a huge amount of material from Twitter, and that's not surprising, given the amount of data that gets published there every second. I found that I got more useful results by choosing to search platform by platform, rather than try and gulp down everything in one go.
I have no idea what the search functionality is, since there's no help or support options, but it does support phrase searching at the very least, but not Boolean.
BuzzSumo is a new social media search engine, and it's got an interesting twist to it. It focusses on the top content that's available in your area of interest. The Top Content search makes it easy for you to find the most shared content across multiple social networks: Facebook shares, LinkedIn shares, Twitter, Pinterest, G+, and totals. You can filter by type - article, infographics, guest posts, giveaways, interviews and video, and by time - 24 hours, week, month, 6 months. You can also see who has shared something, which is very helpful if you're trying to find contacts. Finally, you can also check out influencers, who are the key people in certain subject areas. It's a real nice looking tool - take a look at the interface, then take it for a spin.
Quick Smart Twitter Search is the claim that they make. It's an interesting engine, but it's really designed to follow the tweets of individuals, rather than Twitter as a whole. However, it really does provide a mine of information once you have found the person that you're interested in. Put in the Twitter user name that you want to explore and then wait for a while. There's a very irritating flickering while Gwittr goes and collects data and brings it back - this was a major weakness of the engine IMO - quite slow, and I was searching my name and I don't have a huge number of tweets. In fact, thanks to Gwittr I can tell you exactly: 1394 since February 2013. I can also tell you my top shared sites (bit.ly, which isn't helpful), top users that I mention, most used hashtags.
Thanks to the statistics section of the results I can also tell you that of 3231 tweets since December 2011 (an annoying inconsistency in dates there!) I tweet most on a Thursday, and between mid day and 1 o'clock. The earliest I've tweeted is at 5am, and the latest at 2am. (Not the same day I hasten to add!) I have tweeted 21 photographs, and they are all collected together, and I have linked to just over 1,000 webpages.
Gwittr is a useful search engine - it really pulls personal content together very nicely, and it's a great addition to your Twitter search armoury.
Hshtags is a social media search engine for hashtag discovery across various networks - specifically Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr and Vimeo. You can register for an account, but you can also use it just to search straight away. The idea is that you type in your hashtag of interest - or a person that you're interested in finding something out about, and Hshtags will pull together all of the content that it can find for you, in various formats - written, image or video. You can then take a look at what it's found for you.
It's a great idea, but I have to say that it's buggy at best. It took me three attempts to sign up, and even then it didn't work correctly because one of the social media networks that I wanted to get access to apparently got linked to an earlier attempt to sign up, and it wouldn't let me add it. That's irritating - fixable, but irritating. It's worth trying to get through the process though, because then you can start adding in lists of hashtags, and you can set one of them as your 'home page' which is a nice touch. Here again though, I found the process rather clumsy; I added a list, then tried to add in some tags for it to search and link to the list, and I couldn't delete a typo, I had to cancel and start again. Also, sometime when it retrieved information such as a video, I couldn't play it directly from the screen, I had to follow the link to YouTube. That's messy. However, I did like the fact that I could pin images directly into my Pinterest account with no difficulty at all.
Hshtags is an interesting concept, and I like the idea, but it's going to need to cross a lot more social media networks before it's truly useful. It's also going to need to sort out the other bugs as well. It's worth keeping an eye on though.
If you've ever searched Twitter using their advanced search function (or indeed their basic one come to that) you'll know that it's not very good. Once upon a time it used to go back a month or so - now you're lucky if it goes back a week. So how do you find that tweet from nineteenhundred and frosty weather? Help is at hand in the form of Topsy at http://www.topsy.com/
It has a database of every tweet back to 2006, which is the region of about 425 billion tweets. Twitter is now pushing out somewhere in the region of 400-600 million tweets per day and each one is indexed on Topsy within 150 milliseconds - which is a statistic that I can barely comprehend - I don't know about you! If you'd like another statistic - the amount of data being produced by Twitter and Facebook is more than the rest of the web combined. It's all on Google? I really don't think so.
Social networks - need to find one? There's rather more than the half a dozen that you can probably bring to mind. Take photography for example - there's about 40 of them. This is where Mamuna comes into play. It's a search engine of social networks - which is to say that it doesn't search a social network, it tells you what's out there which may appeal to you. If you're interested in books or libraries (and why wouldn't you be?) Mamuna provides access to dozens of them. Searches have to be fairly broad, and you may need to be a bit inventive with searches - craft and crafting gave different results, knitting returned yet another result and Ravelry only came up when I searched knit.
As well as a listing of social networking sites there are reviews and background histories for them, and there's also an option to add your own review as well. It's a really interesting site and worth looking at, just to check to see if there's a network for your particular interest.
I've seen a few Twitter visualisation tools, and the HiveMindMap is one of the most attractive. Just take a look:
You can search for particular words or tags, but it's not (meant to be) comprehensive, so you'll only get the recent stuff. You will see links between terms, with the thicker the line, the more important the connection. You can drill down into the words, getting information on a phrase, related terms, key users and so on. It's not just pretty, it's quite useful as well.
Curaytor.com is supposed to be a conversation search engine. They've had a good old pop at Google+ and Facebook, so they're clearly up for a bit of a tussle. I watched the 'Who are we' video and quite frankly was left none the wiser. I tried I few of my usual search queries - nothing. I tried the help link - it's basically an email form. I looked at what they defined as 'trending' conversations. Nothing that I would regard as 'trending' at all - no news, just what seems to be a series of almost entirely random tweets. Next I tried 'Popular', and again it seemed to be nothing other than random tweets. 'Latest' gave me the same. 'Staff picks' - the most recent was a week old.
Next I tried a few of their examples - maybe it was just me? They suggested a search for the topic 'mobile' and the top tweet that came up was 'make sure your site is mobile friendly' which was tweeted almost 24 hours ago. I tried a few more of their examples - utter rubbish.
I sometimes find engines and resources that are - well, just let's say they're not very good. This one has raised (or should it be lowered?) the bar on 'total rubbish'. I can't even begin to describe how poor this thing is. Leave well alone would be my advice.
Well, the news is well and truly out now, and as many people have been predicting, Facebook has launched their own search engine. The video at the end of my post gives you a quick overview of a few of the things that it's goingo to cover, but I'm obviously interested in looking at it in terms of the information professional.
It's being rolled out slowly, with limited testing in the United States, so the rest of us will have to wait awhile before we can start to play with it, but you can request early access as well. It's still very basic at the moment, but the thrust of where Facebook is taking search is very clear. To start with, it's NOT a web search engine. You can't use it to find all the pages on the web where there are references to a particular football team for example - it's designed to leverage the huge amount of content that's contained within Facebook. That's a really big reason on its own as to why librarians and other information professionals will need to have access to Graph Search (as well as the rest of Facebook of course), because it's a huge information resource. To deny access to Facebook is to deny access to an extremely large portion of the internet experience - I'm not going to replay all the figures associated with Facebook here; you can check out my Pinterest collection of social media statistics or run on over to Visual.ly and do a search for Facebook Statistics and either of these resources should give you the information you need.
Graph search is starting out around the Ps - People, Places, Photographs. The idea is that you'll be able to do a search to find out what your friends like, so you could find out which boardgames your friends like, or which boardgames your married friends with children enjoy playing. You could locate a dentist based on recommendations from friends, or the restaurants in a particular area that you'll probably enjoy eating at based on trusted (ie friends) recommendations. You'll be able to explore particular areas and see the photographs that friends or colleagues have taken, so you might decide to grab photographs of London that friends took on holiday, which the pictures that work colleagues took may be of conferences or convention centres because they were in London working.
Don't worry - privacy will still be a big thing, and the information that you can get will be based on whatever settings people have chosen, but you'll also be able to get data on information that people have shared publically, and that's still a large number of people - about 25% of the Facebook community. However, Facebook does have a very patchy record when it comes to privacy issues, so this is something that you'll need to look at when it comes to using the service yourself - or when your friends do!
So, up until now, Facebook has been about you and your friends. There's certainly an element of leverage here in that the Graph Search will collate a lot of that information together in new and interesting ways. Does this make it a Stalkers toolbox? I think that's going to be down to the settings that you choose for yourself, but it's going to make us think really hard about why we want to use Facebook and importantly how we use it. Is it just for 'friends' or are those friends actually 'colleagues'. In the video, one of the engineers makes a really interesting point that in future we're going to be able to use Facebook - not just to find our friends and colleagues, but to find people that we perhaps should know, or who can help us do something that we currently can't.
This is where the value and importance of Facebook Graph Search starts to come into play, and hopefully you're already seeing how a library could utilise this. I would suggest that every library (public, private, corporate, academic etc) needs to be on Facebook. Your library needs to be found. Now of course, it can be found when people are doing generic searches on Google and the rest of the search engines, but the important point here is that if people are already logged into Facebook, they're more likely to use the search option in the future - particularly if they've found that it works well for them. So if you're not there, you probably won't exist or be thought of by the searcher. In exactly the same way that a few years ago I would argue that a library or business needs to be on the internet, because who uses the printed Yellow Pages any more? If you're not on the net, you don't exist. If you're not on Facebook, pretty soon you won't exist either - it really is that simple.
So - the library needs to have a Facebook presence; it's becoming vital. However, that's only stage number one. Stage two is that library and other professional staff also need to be on Facebook, so that they can be found. For example - I have an interest in American History (the Civil War to be precise) and if I'm going to the States to speak at a conference, I'm going to be keen to see if I can pop in some visits to places that will interest me about the Civil War. Yes, of course I can do a general search and get some stuff, but that's still very clinical. However - if I can see who is going to the conference, and they're friends of mine, I can use Graph Search to find out if any of their friends are into the same interests, or work at a useful library and maybe I can get an introduction to hook up to an expert quickly. Because of the friendship element, I suspect that I'll have a much richer experience than if I just wander into the local museum or library.
However for this to work, that person with the Civil War interest needs to be actively talking about it on Facebook - they have to be engaging, writing about it, mentioning the really great restuarant at the edge of a battlefield that's worth going to, or particular sites, and sharing their photographs. So we're going to have to have an entirely new level of engagement with Facebook for that to work well, and we're also going to have to change - to an extent - our concept of privacy, yet again. If that friend of a friend keeps their interest private, I'm not going to have a chance to make that connection. However, if their information is public, it's a great contact for me. This doesn't mean that everything you do on Facebook all of a sudden has to be public - not at all. However it does mean that we're going to have to think very carefully about what we keep private and what we make available to all and sundry, or indeed if we should have different Facebook accounts for different purposes (which Facebook doesn't like of course, but hey, why should they have all the fun?)
If you - as a professional - have expertise in a particular area, you probably want to share it. You want to help people, or to promote your organisation or your library. You want to be able to reach out into a wider community, and Facebook is offering you a chance to do exactly that. If I'm going to a particular part of the country and I have an interest in local history, wouldn't it be great to be able to see a collection of old photographs or prints of that area which have been shared on Facebook by the librarian in the local public library? If I have a few moments I may then decide to pop into that library to look and see what other stuff is available for me to use. Simply by doing what it is that we do - preserving and presenting information, and working with communities to get more stuff available, we're getting out to that wider audience, and increasing our profile.
This also has an advantage for Facebook as well of course. The one thing that Facebook can't cope with is inertia. This isn't so much a problem for Google, because there are always new things happening that it can index and make available to us, but if we're stuck at 6 Facebook friends that's not really adding that much to the Facebook universe, because you're not sharing content widely or making new connections. However, if you're active on Facebook, and doing more, sharing more and contributing more content Facebook is growing. So, if we move away from the concept of 'friends' and more towards the concept of 'colleagues' there's an entirely different option for Facebook to grow, as we make more friends and share more stuff.
Make no bones about it though, there's a huge impact in other areas as well. If we're moving away from an organisational presence to a personal presence (and I've argued that point well enough in the past, as it's the way that we need to go), how does an organisation respond? Sure, someone can still be responsible for putting up the local history photographs but someone needs to decide to do that, at some level. If we're going to encourage professionals to share their expertise for the benefit of both the organisation and the community, we have to let them do it themselves. This is not going to go down very well with the web development team or the people who produce the Council guidelines on internet use. I would argue that it's our role as information professionals to point out that Facebook is not what it once was, and that it needs to be regarded in a completely new way.
I've already seen people complaining that the new Graph Search isn't going to help brands promote themselves; Larry Kim (CTO of Wordstream) says "It remains unclear on how advertisers will be able to use this Graph
Search product to better market and sell their products to Facebook
users." I beg to differ. It's perfectly obvious to see how this is going to work, because it's going to be much more down to individual users of products to market and sell products themselves, based on their own recommendations. If I like a product, I'm more likely to recommend it to my friends, and if I dislike it, I'm going to be fairly vocal about that. Companies may well have to spend more time interacting with people than they've done in the past, and use their budgets to keep people interested and onside inside of using it to spend huge amounts on advertising to people who are not interested. So advertising is going to have to continue to become more personalised. Once again there's a role here for the information professional. We are generally very well trusted by people, so we can help by talking about the resources that we use - the software tools that we like, the websites that we go to and so on. That will further help our members as well as the members that we don't have yet.I can also see that companies such as LinkedIn are going to have very considerable concerns about this move, since we'll be able to use Facebook to find out what jobs are available, do we already know anyone who works there, or is a friend of ours, we can see what that company does, the attitudes of people who work there and so on. Graph Search is going to very quickly become a cross between Yelp, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Amazon and so on.
Graph Search is a really big deal, and there is no doubt that it's going
to really hit Google. Don't also forget the tie in that Facebook has with both Bing and Blekko, both of which integrate Facebook into their search offerings. This move is going to do them no harm whatever, and in fact will be a really big boost for them, but it will further leave Google out in the cold - because who is going to want some list of websites to look at when they can instead get personalised, tailored content?
Does this require us all to sit glued to Facebook at the expense of other methods of communicating? No, I don't believe that it does. It's perfectly easy to share content across social media with a quick click of a button - you can do it at the bottom of this post if you want to try it out! As we are looking for information, then finding it, we can do the next thing which is to recommend it. However, it does also mean that yes, I believe that we need to spend more time using social media, and that has to move further up the list of priorities. I think we'll be seeing Social media (or Real Time media) roles within information centres, and it should be part of the role that everyone has, not just a few people. We cannot escape it, nor should we - in fact we should be actively embracing it. If we don't, we shall find as Jessops, Comet, BlockBuster and HMV have already found - that we won't be around much longer. For a library and it's staff to flourish we cannot expect people to come to us in the building. We have to go to them, and they are on Facebook, Twitter and the rest.
So, in summary, Graph Search is important for the profession because:
It gives us access to more information to be able to do our jobs better and more effectively.
It will quickly put us in contact with people who we can contact for information, and who we may have a link with.
It's a way that we have of promoting our library to both existing and new members.
We can use it to provide more information than we've been able to do in the past.
It's a very positive way to demonstrate our own skills and abilities.
It gives us more control over the information that we have and how we demonstrate it.
There's another way that's now available to us which means that we can virtually leave the buildings behind us, and connect directly with our members.
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