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Twitter does have track

Saturday, October 18, 2008 by Dave Winer.

Steve Gillmor has been saying that Twitter doesn't have track for quite some time, and for some of that time he was correct, but it's been bothering me for a while because I don't think he's correct now. Hopefully I won't look too stupid if I don't understand all the subleties of tracking Twitter topics.  Permalink to this paragraph

Enough caveats? I hope so. Permalink to this paragraph

Anyway... Permalink to this paragraph

Suppose I want to track all conversations about Obama on Twitter? Permalink to this paragraph

1. Go to the search pagePermalink to this paragraph

2. Enter "Obama" (leave out the quotes). Permalink to this paragraph

3. Click on Search. Permalink to this paragraph

4. WaitPermalink to this paragraph

5. A few seconds later it will say something like this: "58 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see them." When you refresh, sure enough there are the 58 results. (Those were the ones that appeared while I was writing this blog post.) Permalink to this paragraph

Now maybe that's not what Track does, if so I'm stupid. ;-> Permalink to this paragraph




     

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A picture named dave.jpgDave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

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Last update: 12/16/2008; 5:22:12 PM Pacific. "It's even worse than it appears."

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