Journalism’s blog has a remarkably useful section in which they profile developers that create tools that journalists should be paying attention to. A site called Twittermeter.com was measured out broadly yesterday and deservedly so; Twittermeter will become one of the better search tools around.
The site’s inventor, Greg Lavallee, designed the tool to track what people are Twittering about in a graphical, subject plotted timeline. Just like on Google Trends, you input one or two search terms and you’ll see a graph of just how often the term was used in a predetermined time frame.
The Twitter journalistic community needs a tool like this more than anything else. A journalist is able to track a particular topic’s popularity in a way similar to Google Trends. Ideally, Twittermeter would also provide a real time option, but it’s something to wait out for yet. The tool helps people make informed decisions on what was topical. Should the tool go real time, you’d have an incredibly accurate insight into whether what you’re reporting on is hot or not.
Lavallee says he’s collaborating with Terraminds, a Twitter search engine to create a similar tracking tool for searches and that is promising. Twittermeter currently provides details for a week’s time frame and Lavallee is going to add more features to it.