Endlessly Curious

I decided to try out Twitter at the end of last week, mostly as I’d heard so much about it but not really looked into it seriously more than a quick glance over the demo page.  I don’t know what made me suddenly sign up for the service I think I was wanting to more quality information.  This is a common occurrence for me as I read very quickly and even with search engines as good as they are it is still hard to find quality sties to read on any given subject.  So I decided to jump into Twitter with both feet and see what it is like…

You can find my Twitterings on this page, I should probably add a link on the side bar at some point.

So the first thing I noticed after signing up and getting my account activated was that the ‘Find People’ search seems to be disabled, which makes find other people to listen to hard.  Fortunately for me I knew Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror and StackOverflow was an keen twitter user so I managed to find him and Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software via some Google searching.  I also found some more interesting people to follow by looking through who they were following.  But the lack of a working search feature had me stunned for a while that a service could be so popular and yet be missing such a fundamental feature.

Needless to say I eventually discovered search.twitter.com.  Although I can’t remember how I found it, I think it may have been a link I followed after searching through some blog posts regarding finding people on twitter.  I find it bizarre that the link to their main search page is not more prominent than it is: I had to search through the html source of the homepage to find it (its in the footer on the right side).  Unless the developers are actively trying to lower the hits on the search pages for performance reasons: maybe their server was getting swamped?.  Why else would they place the link to their search page (a key feature) in such an obscure location?

Anyway enough about the search page being not obvious to find.  So far I have found twitter fairly useful in terms of content and information: I would not have found Cal Henderson’s excellant ‘Why I hate Django’ presentation from DjangoCon 2008 if I hadn’t seen a link to it on twitter.  I also like reading some of the updates from bloggers I respect allot like Jeff, Joel and Rands as well as watching the flow of information from people talking to those guys.  I’ve also found some more interesting people to follow about web development, php, django and a few other topics via the search page now.

The last thing I’m going to mention is the apparent use of some sort of informal keyword/tag system that seems to be being employed by people, it is as simple as putting a hash (#) in front of the word you want to have as a keyword or tag.  Judging from the amount of times I’ve seen tags like #webdev, #php, #django this seems to be getting used allot by the more technical members of the twitter community.  It would be interesting to see if there is anyway of filtering these posts by their keywords into channels for each keyword, that would make very interesting reading indeed.  And I’m sure someone has probably already done it, I’ve just not found the link yet.