"Twitter Search is perfect."
I read this in the comments of Michael Arrington's Tech Crunch piece on how people should start thinking of Twitter as a search engine. In a previous post, I wrote about some ways I was already doing this, on a more geeky way than perhaps most users would.
But this comment struck me as just a little bit off.
The more I play with Twitter, the more I see its potential. And like a coach of a promising athlete who hasn't yet fulfilled his potential, I want to see it do even better than it think it can.
A couple examples of how I think search.twitter.com (formerly Summize) could improve, or perhaps even derive some business.
REMOVE THE THROTTLING BY IP ADDRESS - Last week, for WeMedia, I tweaked the monitter.com widget to pull in specific tweets that related to We Media, and embedded them on our home page. The problem, however, is that too many bangs on search.twitter.com from the same IP address too quickly results in the unfortunate response "You have been rate limited. Enhance your calm."
This message didn't make it into the widget (Thank God, I think...). I'd love the ability to either pay to override this throttle, or agree to some advertising to come through as a means of balancing the load that my IP address was putting on the server.
EXTEND THE QUERY STRING TO MORE THAN 140 CHARACTERS - It truly is amazing what you can do with some of the query strings in search.twitter.com. But as I found out yesterday, in preparing for the upcoming Traveling Geeks web site, you can only have a search query that is 140 characters or less. Big deal, you say? Well, try limiting a search to just a dozen Twitterers. I have a workaround using Yahoo! Pipes, but I loose the immediacy of Twitter search that I'm almost addicted to.
I know these are small gripes from the sideline, and the world won't end if they're not solved, but again, I point to the coach analogy. And I did go to Maryland.
I read this in the comments of Michael Arrington's Tech Crunch piece on how people should start thinking of Twitter as a search engine. In a previous post, I wrote about some ways I was already doing this, on a more geeky way than perhaps most users would.
But this comment struck me as just a little bit off.
The more I play with Twitter, the more I see its potential. And like a coach of a promising athlete who hasn't yet fulfilled his potential, I want to see it do even better than it think it can.
A couple examples of how I think search.twitter.com (formerly Summize) could improve, or perhaps even derive some business.
REMOVE THE THROTTLING BY IP ADDRESS - Last week, for WeMedia, I tweaked the monitter.com widget to pull in specific tweets that related to We Media, and embedded them on our home page. The problem, however, is that too many bangs on search.twitter.com from the same IP address too quickly results in the unfortunate response "You have been rate limited. Enhance your calm."
This message didn't make it into the widget (Thank God, I think...). I'd love the ability to either pay to override this throttle, or agree to some advertising to come through as a means of balancing the load that my IP address was putting on the server.
EXTEND THE QUERY STRING TO MORE THAN 140 CHARACTERS - It truly is amazing what you can do with some of the query strings in search.twitter.com. But as I found out yesterday, in preparing for the upcoming Traveling Geeks web site, you can only have a search query that is 140 characters or less. Big deal, you say? Well, try limiting a search to just a dozen Twitterers. I have a workaround using Yahoo! Pipes, but I loose the immediacy of Twitter search that I'm almost addicted to.
I know these are small gripes from the sideline, and the world won't end if they're not solved, but again, I point to the coach analogy. And I did go to Maryland.
