Continuing our research into how to navigate the social and micro-blogging networks, specifically twitter, I want to dicuss the various sites and tools which can be used to draw a map of the twitterverse.  The tools fall into categories of search and survey.

Search. Like every other internet based network there are several solutions for searching the twitter world.  Each search tool is oriented towards a specific goal.  For searching against keywords there are 2 good options: Twitter Scan and Monittor.

Twitter Scan has a google like interface and behaves in a similar fashion: enter a keyword hit send and matched results are displayed.  You can also search for specific person which is good if you want to seek out people you know.  Addtionally TwitterScan enables you to download search results and other log or database entries from Twitter which could be helpful if you wanted to improt the data to another system.

Monitter takes a different approach to providing keyword matching results.  With Monitter you provide upto three sets of keywords for it to continuously search for.  It is live searching where as Twitter Scan is historical.  The live searches lead to an almost real-time display of matching twitter messages.  As new twitter messages are found that match your criteria they are displayed at the top of the list.  This is very interesting to watch but somewhat difficult to keep up with. Especially if your keywords are popular or related to a current trend.

Survey. Survey is different than search in that you receive a specific measurement of activity. For example, number of matching twitter messages or number of followers.

TweetVolume delivers basic charts for a series of keywords.  This is helpful if you wanted to measure the chatter of a specific product, event or marketing subject.  An example TweetVolume chart can be found below.  For this example I wanted to know how many people may be thinking of buying something so my keywords were “shopping for” and buying.  I threw in email as well:

TweetStats Whereas TweetVolume provides a measure of keyword activity, TweetStats provides activity measurements for a Twitter user.  This is interesting information if you want to know the behavior or the predicted status of a particular user.  The measures that TweetStats provides are: number of messages, timeline of activity, number of replies, and the number of messages from each type of Twitter client.

With these types of tools freely available, one can really get a good view into the twitterverse and perform some interesting analysis for brand sentiment, market penetration and customer behavior.

Twist Does a good job of automatically capturing trends and hot keywords mentioned in the twitter world.  Their visualizations enable you to quickly compare activity and trending over a time period of 30 or 7 days.