I just realized I never posted here about my recent Twitter Bio Search Tool, TweepSearch. I guess I’ve just been a little heads down lately. I’ve been busy with various Twitter apps, work, and I’ll be heading to Boston tomorrow for the SOURCE con and to visit with friends and family.
Anyway, TweepSearch - the original idea of the site was to allow somebody on Twitter to search the bios of their followers. It was inspired by a tweet from @SethSimonds and you can read more on the About page. However, once I started building it, I realized I was creating a more generic Twitter bio search application. I just updated the application yesterday and it now allows you to login (non-SSL, I’ll be fixing that eventually) and (un)follow directly from the interface, searches all Twitter profile fields by default, and allows you to search your friends and followers. Some examples:
Search for security peeps in Seattle: location:seattle security Search my friends and followers for security peeps: @dacort security Search my friends for peeps in Boston: @dacort only:friends location:boston Except for those folks I’ll see at the con ;): @dacort only:friends location:boston -hacker -security
As you can see, the search syntax is pretty extensive. I’d like to add geo-based searches in the future as the full-text indexing engine I’m using supports it. Thinking Sphinx, the Rails plugin for Sphinx is also amazing and I have to thank EC2 for allowing me to scale so quickly when the site first got hammered due to a great post on louisgray.com courtesy of Jesse Stay.
I’m currently just over 1.4 million Twitter profiles indexed and constantly growing. :)