Twitter Search

There are announcements that Twitter will add new functionalities to Twitter Search (Cnet). Links will be crawled (which is currently not the case) and a reputation ranking system will be worked out. This is of course good news.

But some of the current limitations of Twitter Search are not discussed. The Twitter Search API currently returns up to 1500 search results. Older tweets cannot be found thru the API. According to Mashable there were over 10000 tweets per hour related to swine flue. Even if there are less than 1500 matching tweets for a search query, tweets older than a couple of months will not be found. Tweets from several months apparantly disappear in a black hole for Twitter Search.

Another issue to be tackled with a reputation ranking system is that it has to take into account that there are many (sub) communities on the Twitter platform. They are all linked together thru Twitter users who are within multiple communities. Twitter users in a country can be considered as an example of such a community, as shown in the various previous posts on this blog where the twitospheres in particular countries were analyzed. But there are also communities by topics of interest.

Reputation is important within a context. A user from France will probable use French for his tweets within the French Twitter community, whereas a German Twitter user will use German. How will a global reputation tackle these contexts ? How will a reputation ranking system detect the language used in tweets ? Someone can be very influential in a specialized community, but on a global level never appear in a top 1000.

Reputation is a property linked to a person, where a person can have a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a Linkedin profile, one or more blogs. But he can also be present in the traditional world, he can be invited as speaker on major conferences, he is perhaps author of groundbreaking books, ... A reputation ranking system within Twitter will only catch a part of someone's "global" reputation.

Nevertheless I am looking forward to the new functionalities that Twitter will be releasing in their Twitter Search product, hopefully soon.