There are thousands of conversations happening on twitter every day of the year. In fact, hundreds of them take place every minute of the day and keeping track of all of those different conversations can be a pain. Summize is a search engine for Twitter which gives users a way to search and discover topics being expressed from within the community.
Summize monitors recommendations, opinions, and buzz. Summize then indexes Twitter’s public timeline in realtime, threads together associated tweets, and gives you the search tools to dig in. For example, the front page of Summize shows the following trending topics: Obama, Symbian, McCain and of course, Carlin which is most likely George Carlin.
Using FireFox3 or FF3 as a search query produced an abundant amount of results. Not surprising considering it was recently released to the public just a few days ago. The search results are presented in almost the same fashion as the Twitter public timeline. On the right hand sidebar of the search results page, there are options to Twitter the search results or to Subscribe to that search query via RSS. This is a handy feature if you would like to get a birds eye view as to what people specifically on Twitter are saying in regards to a particular topic. Also a handy function in the sidebar is the translation drop down menu. You can translate the tweets in over 10 different languages.
As you can see from this image of a search result, there is a link called Show Conversation. When you click on this link, an ajaxy drop down will display the tweets in which people responding to the original tweet. That alone is a cool feature as Twitter doesn’t particularly have a great interface for following conversations.
Like other web based services/applications, Summize does provide a few different ways to access the service without actually being on the site itself. For starters, you can add Summize.com to the list of search engines to use within FireFox. Also, Summize has a list of applications that have been created which utilize their search engine. This list can be accessed here. Popular apps which have already been created include the love hate think believe feel app, StrawPoll, and Addict-o-matic.
Conclusion:
Summize makes it as easy as pie to get a top down perspective as to what the majority of users on Twitter are talking about. I would like to see a way for me to subscribe to the trends being discussed without having to manually subscribe to individual keywords. Other than that, it’s a cool service that alot of people are using to stay up to date with trends in the Twittersphere.