Using Twitter for Information Discovery
by Steve King
You can’t miss all the noise around Twitter these days. A Google news search turns up over 50,000 Twitter news hits last week alone.
But we haven’t seen much on Twitter and information discovery, which is one of our primary uses.
Twitter is a great research tool. We use it almost every day to discover new information about topics familiar and unfamiliar to us.
The most powerful part, in our opinion, of using Twitter for information discovery is the role humans play. Tweets are, mostly, entered by people. This provides nuances and slants on the information sources that traditional search tools do not.
For example, if you search on “small business innovation” in Google the results are web pages containing those words. With Twitter search the results are tweets that a human thinks are relevant to the topic of small business innovation. We’ve found this to be a subtle but important and powerful difference.
Social search – considering the interaction or contribution of search users – is often cited as the future of search and information discovery. Twitter search is a form of social search that is here today.
You can also quickly find out who is passionate and knowledgeable about a topic through Twitter. We recently needed to learn more about the economic stimulus package and health care. Through Twitter we found several experts and were able to connect with them using Twitter direct messaging.
We still use traditional methods are search for information discovery, but Twitter has become a valuable research resource in our work.
Thought...
