Flocking.me Focuses Search on Your Following
Ever since I first started messing with Twitter, I always wondered why there wasn’t a simple way to search tweets only from those you’re following. There are millions of Twitter users and it’s often impossible to find the needle you’re looking for out of that haystack. Flocking.me not only lets you limit results to those you’re following, but also provides a few other interesting and useful features.
To get started, sign in with Flocking.me using OAuth (this means you’re not sharing your actual password). You’ll come to a view of all the tweets from those you follow. Starting off, you’ll be looking at grid mode. You can also switch to List mode, which is more like what you would see on the Twitter website.
The most interesting of the 3 views is Map View. Each tweet appears as a push pin on a global map (powered by Google). You have all the standard zooming and panning features available. What’s awesome about this view is that you can search within it to find tweets about a specific thing and use the map to narrow down the areas. For instance, I could search for “dinner” and get a visual picture of who is talking about it in Atlanta and maybe have a mini tweet-up.
Flocking.me adds more power to Twitter search by letting you do wildcard searches. Tired of people tweeting about iphones? Don’t care much about Google’s alleged Nexus phone? Just add “-iphone” or “-nexus” to your search terms.
Another great feature of Flocking.me is the ability to see the topics trending within your flock. The trending topics on Twitter are pretty easy to game and usually kinda useless. Trending topics on Flocking.me are coming only from the people you have chosen to follow.
One great use I stumbled across by accident was finding out if you are following spammers or otherwise repetitive and boring tweeters. When the search focus is only on the people you follow, tools, phrases, links, and even entire tweets stick out like sore thumbs and let you weed these people out. A simple yet powerful tool, Flocking.me can help you cut through the noise and get exactly what you want.
What do you think?
(props to Charnita Fance)
Category: News | Tags: flocking.me, twitter
About the Author Rahsheen has been a certified geek since before it was the thing to do. He started programming and tinkering in the 4th grade. Now, Rahsheen mostly writes on various sites about technology trends in social media and mobile. . He is also a musician, singer, rapper, writer, and producer. @rahsheen - +Rahsheen Porter - coachrah.com
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