Topsy turvey tweets

25Aug09

I don’t know how I missed this.

This morning I was searching through the comments and backlinks on our company sites when I noticed some backlinks from something called Topsy. I copied the address into my browser and low-and-behold I discovered one of the most exciting sites to hit the web in, well….a while.

Topsy is a search engine for tweets. It recognises what savvy social networkers have known for a while now – that ReTweets are the new currency of the web.

Type a term into Topsy’s simple interface and you’ll see the most popular tweets on that subject. Here’s how Michael Arrington of Techcrunch described Topsy back in late May:

The 30 million or so Twitter users are an army of little content-finding machines. Topsy says those users are sending tens of thousands of unique links per day to interesting things around the Internet.

Some of those users have more influence than others. And some links are sent by lots of Twitter users, others just sent once. Those links, combined with the information in the Twitter message itself, is what Topsy uses as the basis of its search engine.

And the results are…amazing.

I agree.

Topsy is all about context. You can find what is hot online in seconds. The fact that Topsy also rates users by Influence helps verify results. Its a very impressive approach.

Topsy can be very handy for marketers and businesses trying to get their information into the social mediasphere. It allows you to see who has been ReTweeting you, who is talking about you and the amount of influence they have. It can help for both promotion and reputation management.

As someone who spends a LOT of time on Twitter, I suggest that Topsy is a breakthrough site.

Popularity: 1%

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