The Paisano®
Renaissance 2.0

One of the downsides of having a large group of friends on Twitter is the difficulty in following all of the tweets directed at you. In most cases, it’s impossible to catch all of the messages that normally would interest you.

Thus, most of us are relegated to using twitter search engines such as Summize or TweetScan. While both are fine services, they are manual processes that take time that we don’t normally have.

Enter TweetBeep which can send you email alerts whenever someone mentions you, your blog or any other keyword you want to track. For example, whenever someone mentions your name with or without the @ sign it will be captured and a email will be sent with all of the tweets every hour or once a day (your choice). If you want to be alerted for any mention of your websites or blogs then those alerts will take place instantly because the searches are performed live on twitter. The nice thing is that this works even when people use URL shortening services.

Final Thoughts

Search alert tools such as TweetBeep and SM2 (covered in “What About Me“) allow us to keep tabs on everything that’s important to us on the ever expanding information super-highway (Thank you Al Gore!). It’s like having our very own private investigators combing the web for us.

These time-savers are much appreciated as we become increasingly busy. Thanks to these types of services we never have to miss anything again.

The new Twhirl update (0.8.2) has included a much needed new feature for everyone who has ever wanted to create groups for twitter. They now support Rooms on FriendFeed which means you can now filter your firehose of information to whatever you want according to the room you join or create.

For example, you can create a room for your favorite sports team and see only updates on that topic from the people who join that room. Likewise for any other topic such as Social Media, Stamp Collecting, or whatever the case may be. Here’s the room filter option on the bottom right of the FriendFeed client window (the pound sign #): I’ve created a room for Utterz which is selected in the following image.

The beauty is that you can quickly and easily jump from room to room without impacting your other Twhirl window which contains all of your twitter messages. Thus, the digital age’s equivalent of walking and chewing gum at the same time!

Yes, Twitter should’ve done this type of thing long ago, but that’s all right. Just be glad this is here now. We finally have a useful tool that will help us drink from that firehose without getting soaking wet!