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With over 500 million tweets posted every day, Twitter can quickly overwhelm even its most hard-core users. The good news is that Twitter is working hard to help you find the most important tweets for you.
The social media service has introduced two new features: While You Were Away and Searching to make it easier for you to see the most important tweets.
While You Were Away
When you arrive at Twitter you’re greeted with the most recent tweets from people you follow. You may see links to breaking news, helpful articles, inspirational quotes, sports scores, celebrity gossip or whatever interests your tweeps are tweeting about. But you may miss out on some very important tweets that are too far down on your timeline for you to notice.
No worries. Twitter is rolling out While You Were Away, a feature that finds the most important tweets you missed since the last time you visited. From Twitter: “We can use information like who you follow and what you engage with to surface highlights of what you missed and show those to you as soon as you log back in or come back to the app.”
Think of While You Were Away like your Facebook News Feed. Facebook no longer shows you all of your friends’ posts chronologically. Instead, Facebook New Feed displays the posts it regards as the most important ones for you to see.
If you don’t like this new Twitter feature, or when you’ve finished reading the important tweets, you can easily close While You Were Away by clicking on the X to return to your Twitter feed and go back to seeing tweets in chronological order. Unlike Facebook News Feed, Twitter gives you a choice of going back to reading tweets in the order they’re posted.
Twitter recently began rolling out this feature to users so if you haven’t seen it don’t panic. You should have While You Were Away available to you in the coming weeks.
Poll
How do you like to see your social media posts? Do you prefer to be shown important posts first or to see all posts in chronological order? Vote in today’s Wonder of Tech poll and let us know!
Searching Twitter
As Twitter becomes an increasingly important source of information, accessing past tweets gains significance. But until recently, searching Twitter revealed only tweets posted within the past week.
Twitter took on a massive project two years ago: to index its entire database of tweets to make it searchable by users. This indexing project has been completed successfully giving us a much broader access to information on Twitter.
Now every public tweet posted since Twitter’s launch in 2006 is available via search. The indexed tweets database now includes over a half a trillion tweets and is 100 times larger than the previously indexed database of recent tweets. With Twitter’s database growing at a rate of about 3 1/2 billion tweets a week, this search capability represents a ginormous source of information, yet search results are delivered in approximately 100 milliseconds, according to Twitter.
From Twitter:
“This new infrastructure enables many use cases, providing comprehensive results for entire TV and sports seasons, conferences (#TEDGlobal), industry discussions (#MobilePayments), places, businesses and long-lived hashtag conversations across topics, such as #JapanEarthquake, #Election2012, #ScotlandDecides, #HongKong,#Ferguson and many more.”
How to Use Twitter Search
Head to the Twitter Search page and enter your search terms. You can search Twitter by:
- #hashtag
- keyword
- language
- date
- Twitter accounts
- location
- Positive 🙂
- Negative 🙁
- Question ?
Click the Search button and you will instantly be presented with the results of your search. Easy, peasy.
Background on How Twitter Search Was Developed
If you’re a developer, computer scientist or a curious person, you may want to check out Twitter’s Engineering Blog to learn how this massive project was undertaken: Building a complete Tweet index. Kudos to the Twitter team for their hard work in making their site even more valuable.
Also see, Facebook’s New Search Feature May Make You Rethink What You Post.
Your Thoughts
Have you seen the While You Were Away Twitter update? Are you glad to be shown more important tweets when you log on to Twitter? Have you used Twitter’s new search feature? What features would you like to see Twitter add? Let us know in the Comments section below!
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* Twitter cloud image (edited) by Jeff Turner via Flickr and Creative Commons
Hi Carolyn,
Happy New Year to you and yours, as it’s the first comment on your blog in this year 🙂
I’ve had a little break doing up the ABC and the blog a little, and some time spent with the kiddos, back now into the grind!
This is interesting indeed. While You Were Away that finds the most important tweets we might have missed since the last time we visited. It hasn’t yet come up my end, as you mentioned they are still rolling it, so would love to see how it shows up. Perhaps a little like our Facebook newsfeed, though that also shows you the most visited friend’s pages or those you interact most with, right on top.
I’ve never tried the advanced Twitter search as yet, not had the time actually! But yes, hastags and the mentions have always helped to find people and other related words and locations. Need to try it out and see.
Thanks for sharing this with us. Have a nice week ahead 🙂
Hi Harleena, Welcome back! You were definitely missed while you were away but I’m glad you had a wonderful break. Always great to see you here at The Wonder of Tech!
I don’t have While You Were Away either yet, but I’m excited to get the feature. I usually go on Twitter a lot but with all of the tweets, it’s easy to miss important ones. This new feature will make seeing those important tweets much easier.
I am also excited about the search feature. So much important information is on Twitter but now we can find it from the beginning of Twitter. Such a huge undertaking but Twitter didn’t shy away, it completed the task and gave us super fast search results. Very cool!
Hi Carolyn,
I haven’t seen this yet, but as I was reading this I heard a siren and checked Twitter for local ‘news’. I read that some expert on terrorism at Fox news had said that Birmingham was a Muslim city where non-Muslims can’t go. A lot of jokes followed. We already joke about needing passports for Birmingham! England not Alabama, I might add. I remember walking to a friends house there one Sunday and it was like being in a foreign country and a bit scary!
You will like my photography post this week. It’s took a lot of research and I took photos especially. It was freezing yesterday too! I had all my thermal wear on! I’m doing a sort of online photography course, on Wednesday will be part 2 – landscapes; on a Zillion Ideas. I hope this one makes the newspaper!
Hi Mike, Yes, the world is on edge now with all of the terrorism, and Twitter can be the quickest source to find out what has happened, locally or internationally. When I lived in England, I was living in a foreign country, but it wasn’t scary. I’ve also visited Muslim countries that weren’t scary either. But I do hope that the terrorism is eradicated so no one is afraid any more.
I look forward to seeing your photography tomorrow, Mike!
I am really glad to see that my vote mirrors the maximum votes so far.
I think thats the most sensible approach, particularly as I can often catch up on Twitter, what I have missed on email.
In busy and emotional times, such as my daughter’s wedding in mid December and the passing of my mother-i-law three days later, it was really hard to even check my mail.
But twitter with its short quick posts on my phone made sure that I was not utterly lost.
If it improves and I learn to use it better, Twitter is going to beat FB by a long shot on my list of Social Media.
Hello Nick, Welcome back! I’m sorry to hear about the loss of your mother-in-law after your daughter’s wedding. Yes, during challenging times we may not have much opportunity to check social media to figure out what’s going on. But Twitter can be an efficient source of information, especially with these two updates.
The poll results so far are fascinating. Usually results are more mixed but there seems to be a strong preference so far!
Hi Carolyn,
What an awesome topic indeed! I was really looking for the same.
Now, it will be easy for me to find the best tweets around.
Thanks for sharing this great idea to find best tweets.
Have an awesome day!
Hi Nisha, Yes, whether you’re on Twitter a lot or you just want to spend the minimum time on the site, you will be pleased with these updates. They allow everyone to use Twitter more efficiently, which is very handy!
Thanks for this post on Twitter, I’ve made the decision to really learn how to use this social network.
I’ve been on it for years and haven’t really been able to make heads or tails of it. Actually I think my problem is I’ve always connected to my sites. This year though, I am working on engaging with it and connecting with people in a more meaningful way.
Hi Larry, Yes, people use Twitter for many different reasons. Some just read and never post tweets while others use Twitter as a truly social media site. The key is to find out how to make Twitter work better for you.
Both of these updates will be useful to you no matter how you use Twitter.
Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts, Larry!
What a great addition. For me “While your away” is nice to have but the most important part is the ability to search the tweets. Cant remember the number of times I got frustrated with Twitter because they couldn’t support this. Twitter just got a whole lot better.
Hi Nishadha, Welcome to The Wonder of Tech! You’re right, both features are very handy, but the ability to search the entire Twitter database is a game-changer. I too have run into the roadblock of Twitter search results only showing recent tweets. Having access to tweets going back to 2006 is huge!
Well said, Nishadha, “Twitter just got a whole lot better.”
Managing my Twitter account is such a hassle sometimes. I use TweetDeck to try and keep up on the conversation, but it can be nearly impossible in my industry. There is simply so many tweets occurring every second of the day, and a lot of retweets!
Using the advanced search is something I have done a lot, but I haven’t seen the “while you were away” feature just yet. In fact, I might have just overlooked it.
I’m happy that Twitter is trying to help their users stay in the loop at all times.
Hi Mike, Yes, it can be extremely challenging to weed through all of the tweets to find ones of value to you. If you use TweetDeck, you won’t see While You Were Away, that works only on Twitter’s website and native apps.
You’re right, it’s very helpful to have Twitter add these features to help us find the best tweets for us. I hope these features become handy for you to use!
Hey Carolyn,
Welcome back, great to see you and I just got back yesterday myself as you know.
I ran over to Twitter but I obviously don’t have the While You Were Away feature yet. I rarely go to Twitter itself though so will have to remember to keep checking that to see if I’m interested or not. I guess at times I might want to know what they felt I missed but then again if they are anything like Facebook with their thinking of what I want to see and what I don’t then I’ll probably be disappointed. LOL!!!
I don’t really use the search feature but I kind of like that addition. You can find any tweet since they started. I remember downloading all my tweets last year I believe just to have them and look back. It’s kind of funny actually but if you’re searching for something in particular I’m sure that feature will be very helpful.
As always thanks for updating up on this and you be sure to have a great week okay!
~Adrienne
Hi Adrienne, So great to have you back! I didn’t actually leave for very long but it’s wonderful to have everyone else back in the blogosphere. It was pretty quiet over the holidays!
Yes, I don’t have While You Were Away either yet, perhaps I need to be away for longer for that feature to appear on my Twitter account!
You’re right, you need to either go to Twitter’s website or app to see that feature. I do use Twitter directly, without a third party, but I haven’t seen While You Were Away yet.
I knew that you could download all of your own tweets into a file and save them so you could search your own tweets. I never did that though because I never felt the need to search my own tweets. Have you ever needed to use that file to find one of your old tweets?
The good news is that now you don’t have to download a file any more. You can search all of your old tweets by using the Twitter search page and entering your Twitter ID in the search field.
I hope your holiday weekend is going well. We had a big ice storm here this morning that was dangerous for a lot of drivers. But it was a great excuse to stay home. 🙂
Hey Carolyn,
Wanted to get back with you and answer your question.
I downloaded all my tweets because it was fun to look back to see what I shared over the years. I got a big laugh out of some of them and hung my head low with others. There were many years in the beginning I listened to the wrong people’s advice so it’s not that I would search for a particular tweet but just see what I shared.
Our weather is amazing this weekend, low 60’s and the sun is finally out. It’s been cold and raining for weeks now so this is a wonderful change. Almost shorts weather my dear.
Be safe and have a great week.
~Adrienne
The “while you were away” is very useful for me as I don’t often visit twitter that much compare to Facebook and Linkedin.
I love the new search feature of Twitter. Because of this, I am able to find potential prospects, clients and even my competitors and filter those that I don’t need.
Hi Arnel, Wow, it sounds as if you’re going to make great use of these new features on Twitter. Who knows? You may start to use Twitter more because of these new features!
Hi Carolyn,
Wonderful post indeed. I was wondering how people find best tweets on Twitter when I tweet everyday. This blog post is so perfect for me to find the best tweets from now on. Thank you so much 🙂
Hi Evelin, Welcome to The Wonder of Tech! I’m so glad you found this article to be helpful to you. Thanks for taking the time to join in on the conversation.
Hi Carolyn,
While You Were Away it’s an great feature. As i am not an regular twitter user it help me get all update from it.
Hi Yasin, I’m glad you’re enjoying the While You Were Away feature of Twitter. I just got the feature over the weekend and find it to be very handy!
Hi Carolyn,
Though I haven’t seen the update as of now but will surely login and see the changes. Something new added is always for better and I always welcome new changes from different social media platforms as doing the same thing again and again is fine for sometime.
But somehow, I am confused that how Facebook an Twitter know what’s important for us that shows up in the news feed? As, may be there are things that we don’t think are important and this happens most of the times with me. I guess they should work upon the feature about how a user can choose what’s important and what’s not. What do you think Carolyn?
I just got this update over the weekend, Aditya, and I was very glad to see it. I don’t know what algorithms Twitter and Facebook use to decide what to show you, but you have a great idea that they should let us refine what we see. It would be great to vote up or down what we want to see. The could be how my favorite app Zite has become so very accurate in delivering compelling content to me.