Get ahead of the curve: 8 useful social search tools
At Nostradamical.com we’re all about predictions - predictions on future events, world affairs and hot topics on the public’s mind. So naturally we’re interested in the whole social search and ‘real time search’ debate.
We’ve listed out some real time & social search resources currently available that give users the ability to monitor what’s on mind of internet users the world over. The debate continues over Twitter’s overall dominance of real time search.
One Riot
Firstly our fav is One Riot - currently in Alpha. What’s cool about One Riot is that without even searching you can get the hot topics of the day right off the front page. And they are actual topics, not random keywords. Nice work guys. Check out their blog for more discussion on the week’s hot topics.
SamePoint
SamePoint.com is a social search engine that categorises Social Mentions, Discussion Points, Bookmarks, Wikis, Network,s B2B Networks, Groups, Life Casting, MicroBlogs, Reviews, Podcasts, Documents, Video, Images, News and Web. It has a Google Trends-like page that lists current trends.
SocialMention
SocialMention.com has a nice clean interface and presents social search results across a variety of sources from blogs to social networking data. You can get RSS feeds on your results. For example you can track our own mentions right here. Again, they have a nice trends page here.
Facebook Lexicon
Facebook’s own tool - Lexicon - is quite interesting to use but actually lacks the visual interest and punch of something like SocialMention.com. It feels like more of an experiment than a useful tool.
Twitter - Twist
Twist, the app from Flaptor indexes current trends from Twitter and allows users to monitor ‘keyword frequency’ inside the Twitter cloud. It’s interesting to compare the frequency of words like ‘twitter’ against ‘facebook’. However a look at the top 10 most popular terms yields some bizarre entries like ’sunday’ and ‘monday’. Given I am checking this on a Monday morning I guess Twitters are tweeting about their weekend activities and being back at work on a Monday. But, this is not really giving us an insight into ‘hot topics’, but rather ‘hot words’.
Google Trends
Google Trends, as you would expect is a heavyweight offering from Google with plenty of drill down functionality. You can compare search trends my topic, location, etc which gives detailed insights into specific terms and related words. My favourite page is the ‘hot trends’ page which gives a list of hot terms for the day. If you don’t know where to start this is a good place.
Twingly
Twingly has a nice microblog search function similar to SocialMention but with more limited functionality.
Delver
Worth mentioning also is Delver which is a social search page based more around your own network. Great for keeping in touch with hot trends in your immediate social universe.
Between these tools you can get a real feel for what’s out there. However the real ‘real time’ search market is yet to be fully harnessed with clear trending information and meaningful insights. Let’s keeping watching this space.
If you recommend more tools please let us know!
Carmel Hagen
February 16, 2009 @ 8:14 pmWow, thanks so much for the high fives! We have some really awesome new features rolling out soon too (shhh
- so keep an eye out!!
One cool thing about twitter search is that it does a great job helping you find the stuff that people are openly excited about. Events they’re at, issues they care about (the Obama election) and unexpected things like natural disasters - Twitter kicks a** with these. We’re excited about what we’re doing because not only can we do what twitter does, we can actually do more, because we don’t have to depend on people tweeting that information in order to give that info to our users - we already have it. Now if we could just see into the future like you…