Searching conversations: twitter, facebook, & the social web

Greg Notess, reference team leader, Montana State University
Monday, Oct. 20

Greg’s website: www.searchengineshowdown.com

Question: Online conversation as database: does it disappear? what are the privacy issues?

• public conversation: if the NSA is data mining conversation, perhaps use images as text (therefore not necessarily visible)
• question: public vs. private – the lines between these are blurring
  fully public: open web sites
  semi-public communities that are members only
  mostly private – if no one else shares.
• what is archived and where?
  email: you have to rely on others not sending out your email as forwards.
  mistakes: sending email to many by mistake
  facebook: has more privacy than other services.
• keep track of conversations: use email and email discussion lists, usenet (google groups), web forums. Search dejanews searches newsgroups archives.
• keep track of events and history through your personal email and discussion lists archives. list web archives as history may be available to members only.
• A tool to use for searching archives – www.summize.com  – this was bought by twitter since they had no search method and has morphed to www.twitter.search.com
  Incredible search options, search reviews/opinions, twitter search.
• What’s on twitter right now?
• what is happening with IL2008?
  

www.twitter.com
use to: find the topics that are important to people (at least in the twitter realm), short online conversations ranked by rate of frequency
use to find a topic, or what is happening in a place, limit by distance, etc. in the advance search
use to find news from the people who are active in online space
use to reply to people who send twitter messages

twitter is a public space – but you can set privacy options to private. Only your friends will see your posts.
search:

- http://search.twitter.com/
- www.tweetsearch.com

www.facebook.com
set privacy settings the way you want them; there are many options for privacy settings.

www.spokeo.com
find social network participation, search by amazon wish lists, etc.
search by all known email addresses to find a person.

other ways to track conversations:
blogs and blog comments
video comments, etc.