What are Twitt(url)y and Twitturls? Twitter Search Engine too?
I have a great WordPress plugin called CyStats. This allows me to see in real time who is visiting or crawling my blog. I recently started posting my blog entries to Twitter and noticed two web crawlers called HTTP://TWITTURLS.COM and TWITTURLY/V0.5. Later a friend sent me a link to Twitturly and that led to finding Twitturls. These sites were the source of the crawlers.
Both sites do the same thing, they crawl Twitter and look for URLs. They then catalogue these links and list the most popular ones by how many times they have been posted. At a glance both sites have many of the same links, which makes sense. It’s a great idea, scan what’s popular as people talk about it.
The next big thing?
If either of these sites take off which one will dominate? Twitturly or Twitturls? The one with the best usability and most accurate results will probably win. At the time writing both seem to be bad at filtering out duplicates. What I mean by this is duplicate links that go to different sites describing the same thing. This is not good since things that get really popular will fill the front page. Who wants to see a page of links going to the same thing? What they should do is try and break down a popular topic into a category and then grab the single most popular link from that topic. Trash the rest or even do something similar to Google news where you can break it down into other links in the same category. This would probably involve a lot of logic, but it would make the site a lot more useful.
A Twitter search engine
Another cool site which both Twittyurly and Twitturls use to power their sites is Summize Conversational Search. This is a Twitter search engine. I tried searching a tweet of mine and it showed up right away.
If you have used Twitter people trade links like crazy on the site. Could these Twitter link scanners become the next Digg? They rank popular sites without a user actually having to say this site is cool, they just scan what we tweet about. The search engine is a great way to find out what is currently hot on Twitter too, only you can narrow it down to your own interests.
