ON THE FLY How news media are making friends in the world of social networking

On trend, off topic

When you first join twitter it can seem like it is just Facebook but with only statuses. That is what I thought when I signed up, but then I discovered trending and search and realised how it could actually be a useful tool for journalists.

However as good as they can be, there are somethings for which searches do not work. Yesterday The Times' Joanna Geary tweeted, "Oh good grief! Any tips on how to search and filter for news stories about automotive brand Seat?#namesthatdon'tworkontheweb."

I think she was talking about searching on the web generally, but it raises the issue of how not everything is easy to find on twitter. Words like Seat are confusable and it's therefore hard to find the tweets which relate to the meaning you want, eg. the brand Seat, rather than just seats.

It is not just confusable words which are hard to find. When people tweet, with only a few exceptions, people do not generally use the 140 characters to include every keyword and tag their tweet relates to. For example, if I'm tweeting about something that happens outside my flat, I usually say 'outside my flat' rather than including the GPS co-ordinates, postcode, ward, borough, county, region, country and continent of my house. So if you were searching for things happening in my area, it's likely it might not come up in any searches.

To some extent I think it provides some relief that twitter does have imperfections which stop it being completely Orwellian. Nevertheless which websites do you find helpful in searching tweets for stories? I'm trying out TwitterLocal, which allows you to find tweets coming from a specific area, I will let you know how I get on.