Social search is resurfacing as a hot topic of late , due to how effective Twitter has become in helping you find information, and how it is close to how we source information in the offline world (via our network). Twitter is being differentiated by being called a “ Help Engine “. From a particular perspective, the search experience I think it’s getting us closer to the KM productivity (sense-making) aim that knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer has always aspired to, which is: finding the right information at the right time

The folks over at BrandonHall, the learning folks who blog lots of interesting links, pointed out a value of Twitter that not all of us may have seen yet. Twitter as a search engine. The question always comes up “why would we be interested in something like Twitter. This was interesting to me because I’m co-leading a short online workshop introducing social media in a global international development network. One application I try to show is Twitter as social listening.

Ever wondered how to search the Bio fields for someone in Twitter? How to search Twitter profiles? Go to Peoplebrowsr and log in using your Peoplebrowsr account, or Twitter account or any other account. Nothing to do with Peoplebrowsr search though. Peoplebrowsr is the only surefire way I’ve found. I

I used to think Twitter was stupid. Twitter is a "micro-blogging" platform that allows you to quickly post short messages[tweets] of I see "What are you doing?" reading the morning paper with a perfect cup of coffee". This is info you may want to know from your intimate others, but not from everyone you are reading on Twitter. I ignore the After one week of actual activity, I find it useful. as the wrong question — it focuses too much on daily minutiae, and not on what others may find interesting about you.

(nearly 100) Here’s a list of journalists from Australian (mostly mainstream, some New Zealanders) media who have embraced, indeed are head over heels, in love with Twitter. Trevor Cook put a dozen Australian Journalists on Twitter together. There is no search mechanism currently to search profiles, except maybe Twellow. Let’s sit here and watch them. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes . Who watches the watchers themselves? By the way, the first social networking book I ever read was The Republic by Plato, mashing’up and misquoting Socrates.

I've now participated in three Twitter chat sessions. I've interviewed Rinus about his way of facilitating a twitter chat. Why did you start facilitating Twitter Chats? It started with a movie that I saw about Twitter Tuesday for the U.S. I said jokingly, that we could start a twitter Tuesday in the Netherlands. The first time was I late, I arrived on the scene towards the end. The second I could not really follow well, I saw all these separate and short messages.

In the spirit of passing time at Christmas, and following on from a heated discussion about the meaning and robustness of community in online environments, I invited 100 of my 1,276 current Twitter followers to fill in a quick survey cunningly designed to provide a fairly wonky measure of community allegiance. I love Twitter and I've spent an unhealthy amount of time hanging out there in the last year. Of course I welcome critical feedback about the methodology employed, but I had two hours sleep last night and yes, I quickly realised the massive cultural bias implicit in most if not all of the questions.

Twitter : Twitter has for some time allowed users to tag their updates with their location details – this has mainly been done through third-party apps, such as Tweetdeck, and to date locations have not been shown on Twitter’s own website. This update was quickly disabled but adding this back in would certainly add significant value to the Twitter site and pave the way for search for people and issues that are trending ‘near me’ – based on where people are when they share their information and not where they say they are in their location.

A Google bomb is where you take over a keyword - usually a made up name or phrase - and “game” Google’s search: The terms Google bomb and Googlewashing refer to practices intended to influence the ranking of particular pages, in results returned by the Google search engine . (wikipedia) Recent one’s on twitter have been #fisting (informal) and # velociroflcoptersaurus (happner and Amnesia). wikipedia) I

People are often comparing Twitter with Facebook. Twitter is not about this at all. It’s about information and search. Twitter, on the other hand is not really built for connecting with people - its real value comes from the comments and contributions that are added to its database and that can then be searched. Image by manfrys via Flickr They’re wrong to do this.