For kicks, I took one of my recent blog posts, and searched Twitter for tweets on the same topic. I limited the search to people I follow on Twitter. Just a fun exercise for curiosity—who is tweeting on the same topics that I’m blogging about? And what are people saying?
For instance, I blogged about Peeps costumes recently. I searched Twitter for: peeps. (Tip: the searching for tweets works a lot better on twitter.com than tweetdeck.twitter.com. Tweetdeck typically only goes back a couple months. Twitter.com will go years and years back.)
The search filters in Twitter.com gives the option to search the tweets from only people I follow.
Someone I know, @marzinka, tweeted about Peeps filled with white chocolate vanilla ganache.
You know what would be awesome?
Imagine an artificial intelligence service that takes each of your blog posts, and does the search automatically for you. Every time you make a blog post, the AI automatically gives you five related tweets from people you follow on Twitter.
Good for research?
There’s a slight chance that maybe someone has additional insight into a recent topic. After trying this out a little bit, I found most of the results are connected only in the slightest tangent way. This doesn’t serve much utility value for research. Maybe some other topics might work better than Peeps.
Building community and social ties
My mind has a recent interest in Peeps. Who else do I know that is interested in Peeps? This fun little search, gives me the pleasure of feeling a little bit of commonality with someone I know. And responding to the person’s tweet makes them feel a little more appreciated too.
Plus, it’s kinda fun commenting on tweets that are eight years old.
I love archives. Everyone is so focused on the stream. I like the notion of a digital garden. That’s an actual term where you tend to things over time. Doing searches like this on Twitter uncovers some fine buried gems.
Searching Twitter for “peeps” has shown me that lots of my friends love to use the word “peeps” when talking about people. I’d say 95% of the tweets are people using “peeps” in that way.