I wrote a post about getting the scoop via Twitter the other day and have found another great service that reporters should know about. It’s called Twemes and allows you to track in real time what people are Twittering about by topic. Not only on Twitter but also on Del.icio.us and Flickr.
Simply input a hashtag plus the topic into your 140 character Twitter bar (like #reportwitters), Twitter about it and find the results back on Twemes, plus those of Flickr and Del.icio.us. That’s brilliant if you need the absolute latest news on a topic.
Also, if you track an event, you can subscribe to a widget or a live rss feed. What the real difference is between Twemes and Hashtags.org? Not immediately clear, but you don’t need to register on Twemes, so it’s probably a copycat of Hashtags trying to compete by giving the users the sense of ease. Check out this blog’s recent interview with Nate Ritter of Hashtags.
Twemes benefits from Hashtags’ existence because all words with hashtags show up on its search results, but you have to become a follower of Hashtags before you’re included there.
What both services’ weakness is, is that you need to be extremely certain that you picked the right tag to track something. For instance, how do you follow a breaking news story for which the obvious Hashtag is not really clear? It’s a gamble. But then, that’s breaking news for you.
A positive factor to Twemes is that you can also conduct ad-hoc polling exercises associated to a tweme, in case you get frustrated with Twittercensus and Twitpoll, which have turned in lacklustre results off late.
1 Comment to “Follow Twitter Topics Real Time On Twemes”
March 7, 2008
This is great to know about. The trick is getting others to use the hashtag, right? I’ve often thought that it would be nice if we could get non-Twitter users to benefit from some of the cool stuff that goes on across the Twittersphere. I mean, watching the tweets on Oscar night were like watching an episode of “Best Week Ever” — but while it was still happening.