As someone who follows Twitter-related news quite closely, I felt quite debilitated a few months ago when Twitter disabled Twitter Track, its keyword tracking service.
When the Twitter team announced Twitter Track in September 2007 as a 'tiny feature' on the official Twitter company blog, users immediately recognized its huge potential. They used it—complementary to the Twitter Replies tab—for ego-tracking, but also to follow updates about events, conferences, news headlines and any topic they wanted to stay informed about. Twitter Track was likely one of Twitter's most popular features ever since.
Unfortunately, Twitter Track still hasn't been restored. Even if Twitter eventually does reactivate the Jabber IM bot that used to provide access to Twitter Track, it's not at all certain that Twitter Track will be enabled along with it. See this screenshot from the June 13th edition of the Twitter Status Blog:
Apparently Twitter track needs serious work before it can be relaunched. That blog post sounded like it's going to take time. In the mean time I needed to look for alternatives. Like many, I started to rely heavily on Summize's Twitter Search on my daily quests for Twitter scoops, having as many as 20 tabs open at any one time.
Suddenly, earlier this week, a Summize query for 'twitter' and 'bot' produced a search result that caught my attention: someone by the name of Dustin Sallings, @dlsspy on Twitter, had made a Twitter Track replacement called TwitterSpy, leveraging the Summize API. This implies the possibility to build complex queries of keywords concatenated by boolean and other search operators.
My blood started pumping: the ultimate Twitter Tracking tool had become reality. TwitterSpy was combining the best of both worlds: the immediacy of instant messaging with the flexibility of Summize's advanced search syntax.
I quickly added twitterspy@jabber.org to my contact list on Gtalk and created a handful of queries, reporting from my @twtooltrack account while I was discovering more and more about TwitterSpy:
Yesterday, after having sufficiently experimented with TwitterSpy, I added another 30 queries. Where Twitter Track requires to enter each keyword with a separate 'track' command, TwitterSpy lets you combine multiple keywords into one logical query. Here's an actual query I use myself:
track Twitter tool OR application OR app OR apps OR
applications OR tools OR service OR services
The interesting part about TwitterSpy is that it's not just a replacement for Twitter Track: it's becoming a full-fledged instant messaging client for Twitter, with commands such as log in, post, search, follow and many more:
Scott Kingery, aka @techlifeweb, has an excellent tutorial on his blog TechLifeBlogged explaining how to start using TwitterSpy if you want to try it yourself: How to set up TwitterSpy in Google Talk.
There are a few potential hazards to TwitterSpy's success that have come up in a chat conversation I had earlier this week with Dustin, the TwitterSpy developer:
The TwitterSpy name: I suggest picking a different name, one that's not already in use as a web domain by someone else. TwitterSpy happens to be the name of a Google Maps + Twitter mash-up that was launched three months ago.
Summize API: TwitterSpy thrives as long as the Summize folks allow it to access the Twitter XMPP public timeline firehose through the Summize API. Now that Twitter themselves have increased the hourly rate limit to 100 requests, the Summize team may insist that TwitterSpy makes Twitter API calls instead of Summize API ones.
Volume: When this bot does catch on with a bigger audience, it's to be seen if the bot and its current host can hold up.
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