Finally: a reasonable way to browse the Twitter stream

After about a year of tweeting @kabissa about Kabissa, African civil society and technology issues, the biggest frustration for me has been an inability to go back later to review what I and others were tweeting and sharing about a certain topic at a certain point in time. Sure, it's possible via http://search.twitter.com and other websites and twitter apps, but the sheer volume of tweets makes most of these interfaces unwieldy. Too often I return from a conference and am unable to find a certain tweet shared on a certain day that I wanted to look into. 

I managed to miss this, but it looks like Google launched a new feature in April that addresses just this issue. (Thank you Guardian Technology News Bucket for the reminder). To try it yourself, go to http://www.google.com and select "Updates" on the left side before typing in your search terms. You can then choose the year and month to browse, and then specific time periods on a given day. 

UPDATE: Click here to watch a screencast I made walking you through Google's twitter search. Thanks @bonniekoenig for pointing out that it was needed!  

Below is a screenshot of Google search results for twitter posts tagged #griconference during the GRI Conference. It was interesting to be able to now go back and review it. Now imagine also being able to do this anytime about any event that people in your community are tweeting about, perhaps to support your academic research or a blog post you are working on, or to review what people were saying about your own presentation.  Beyond conferences and events, this feature helps us to review what people were saying during crises, elections, demonstrations and other important events.

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And here's an excerpt from the Google blog post explaining the new Google Search across the Twitter Archive feature in some more detail, with more screenshots: 

With the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, there’s a constant online conversation about breaking news, people and places — some famous and some local. Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted. We want to give you a way to search across this information and make it useful.

Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try it out, click “Show options” on the search results page, then select “Updates.” The first page will show you the familiar latest and greatest short-form updates from a comprehensive set of sources, but now there’s a new chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period. Here we’ve searched for [golden gate park] and browsed to see March, 2010:

The chart shows the relative volume of activity on Twitter about the topic. As you can see, there are daily spikes in the afternoon (when parks are the most fun) and an unusually high spike on March 27. Clicking on the 27th, you’ll discover it was a sunny Saturday, which may explain the increased traffic on Twitter. People were tweeting about disc golf and tennis, biking, riding a party bus, craving chips and salsa...the kind of local, time-specific information that up until now would be almost impossible to find online.

By replaying tweets, you can explore any topic that people have discussed on Twitter. Want to know how the news broke about health care legislation in Congress, what people were saying about Justice Paul Stevens’ retirement or what people were tweeting during your own marathon run? These are the kinds of things you can explore with the new updates mode.