How FriendFeed Became The Best Real-Time Social Search Engine
Sep 07 2009 
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I almost laughed when I came to this conclusion and then I became really excited. Finally! Something very interesting happened , though I’m sure I’m not the first to have encountered it. I wanted to find out who the author of the blog Prevential is. So I headed to twitter search and proceeded to type do a search on one of his articles to see who tweeted it. Eventually, I hoped it would lead me to his twitter handle.
Side-note: I know this may sound a bit stalkerish to anyone that’s not a geek, but hey, I wanted more info because I liked Derek’s writings.
To my surprise, Twitter returned zero results for one of his articles that had over 50 comments on it:
Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that at least 5 people tweeted his article out of 50 comments that were left. I thought Twitter was trippin’. So I tried again. Same result. Then I thought “let’s see what Friendfeed can do about this!”
Low and behold:
The results extend back to numerous pages and reaches back past February 2009.
Now, focus on the bigger picture for a second…
Do you see what I see?
- How can this limitation of Twitter’s search offerings affect your company’s social presence in the future?
- Do you still want to rely solely on Twitter?
- Do you also notice the difference in the amount of work these services require just from the search perspective? Thoughts?
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Sometimes you don't need to go real-time. I found @derekhalpern in about thirty seconds via Google. :)
so… you have a tweet and stumble 'share this' but not one for friendfeed… oh the irony! – but not to worry, friendfeed has a very sweet bookmarklet that i can use on any page
interesting. I should use friendfeed more often. Thanks for sharing
Perhaps I'm engaging in wishful thinking, but didn't Summize have more robust search capabilities BEFORE Twitter bought them?
Yes, but they also had their hiccups because of Twitter. Can you say the same about FriendFeed?
One could argue that FriendFeed's better availability is due to the fact that they have fewer users than Twitter. Yet Twitter was having serious problems in early 2008, when they had far fewer users. FriendFeed's hiccups are so rare that they're actually newsworthy. (Twitter hiccups are like the weather here in southern California; just what you'd expect.)
One could argue that FriendFeed's better availability is due to the fact that they have fewer users than Twitter. Yet Twitter was having serious problems in early 2008, when they had far fewer users. FriendFeed's hiccups are so rare that they're actually newsworthy. (Twitter hiccups are like the weather here in southern California; just what you'd expect.)