I am constantly amazed at the applications that keep popping up for Twitter, there seems to be no end to the things that people want to do with it. Twitter really does appear to be the internets answer to cell phone’s texting, except of course it is a lot cheaper (when on the internet anyway). I have been looking around for some applications that allow you to search twitter, mostly because I am nosey. I found a few sites, some of which really impressed me.

I’ll start with summize. Summize allows you to search twitter in realtime, bringing up the latest results for the string that you searched. If while you are looking through your results there are tweets containing your search string summize will tell you and allow you to refresh your search. It will also allow you to twitter these results and provides an RSS feed for the query. Summize also has an advanced search feature that allows you to find tweets based on

• words
• people
• places (and distance from)
• dates
• attitudes (smileys)
• links

It is an impressive search engine that must feed the hunger of any twitter searcher!

Tweetscan also advertise themselves as a real time Twitter search, not quite as user friendly as Summize, but Tweetscan will send you a daily/weekly update of any five search strings that you want. It also gives you a link to run your search at anytime, which is handy if you are not wanting your email inbox clogged up! From what I could tell it doesn’t offer an RSS feed to your saved queries, but I may just be overlooking it…

Terraminds also provide a search engine for Twitter. It is a very basic engine that allows you to search updates or users. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed of the query. It is a basic version of Summize. Another basic search engine I found was Twitter Search by Flaptor, who also produce Hounder.

I also found Twitter Who to be a useful application. It searches for people that are registered as Twitter users by using their name or email address, and they promise not to store or distribute the information entered into their search box!

Although not strictly a searching application, I enjoy using Twittervision. It’s hard not to become addicted. It basically shows you a world map and tweets the messages from their originating geographical location. You can have a 2D or 3D map, the 3D map is just so cool! If you haven’t seen it you should go there now! From the same producer there is Twittermap, this allows you to search for a place and see what tweets have been posted.

I think that due to the selection of different searching methods people will gravitate to the one that they find most comfortable, however, it is not clear just now if one method is more popular than another. Of course, Google also picks up tweets, which some people have complained about.