Comments on: The Reason Why I Returned to Twitter: Track is Dead

By: Rob Diana

Rob Diana — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 06:05:05 +0000

If you really want to view something like track, just get the RSS feed for the twitter search. It gives you the same info. However, I never really liked track and love the ability of getting the search through RSS.

By: bwana18751

bwana18751 — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 06:05:05 +0000

The problem with that solution is that it's not realtime. It's just not the same.

By: bwana18751

bwana18751 — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 06:05:05 +0000

I'll find a use for it, but it won't be the same as before, that's for sure. Thanks for reading.

By: Michael Sean Wright

Michael Sean Wright — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 06:05:05 +0000

I too think that track is gone (at least the way we remembered it) but I thought the Twitter team was open to the idea of more access to the 'hose.' It's good to see you trying out Tweetdeck. I have really enjoyed being able to track real time conversations via the global search feature. Marc Canter has really been pushing the idea of the Open Mesh. With Bearhug Camp and other round-table discussions happening, hope we are close to seeing XMPP becoming a usable/ deployable standard. My real desire is to see a better live/ two way stream happen- now. Keep fighting the good fight and remember- it's good to open the palate, sometimes the new flavor is just as tasty.

By: bwana18751

bwana18751 — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 06:05:05 +0000

I still use Twitter search and it doesn't show you new results as they come in. You have to click the link to refresh. Even if it did refresh, it's not realtime. With track, I could track 25 terms in the same window and get the updates realtime, as they happen. Web/RSS updates don't hold a candle to the speed of IM/XMPP. I love Apture.

By: Track Twitter via Kwippy

Track Twitter via Kwippy — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 06:21:24 +0000

[...] containing them on your IM(and mobile) was simply terrific. But then like all the good things Track too came to an end. Folks at identi.ca tried doing track but that too ran into some issues and thus had to be taken [...]

By: Bwana

Bwana — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 04:27:35 +0000

Thanks for commenting! I know about TweetTrak and I recommend it in my latest blog post. Keep up the good work.

By: RyanK

RyanK — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 04:14:30 +0000

Sorry i didn't find this post sooner!

You should check out my bot, TweetTrak… its the next best thing to what Track actually was. In some ways, its better, since it uses the twitter search engine so any query you can run there, can also be run via TweetTrak, continuously… It sends you text messages whenever it finds the term.

It is also near realtime… or as up to date as the search indexes are. It runs your search as often as once a minute, and it scales out to once every couple hours if it hasn't seen a new match in a few weeks. I think that's a fair trade off and should provide a lot of scalability.

At about 300 users now, and things are still running very smoothly, with a lot of new features planned. (ignoring updates from people, perhaps because they spam a lot or perhaps because you have device updates on for them, and eliminating dupes if a tweet matches multiple searches you're tracking)

Hope this helps!

RyanK

By: Twitter 2008: Get Used To It (Goodbye IM/Track) | Bwana.org

Twitter 2008: Get Used To It (Goodbye IM/Track) | Bwana.org — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 15:16:24 +0000

[...] month, I blogged my return to Twitter due to the fact that the Track feature was dead. I saw the responses Twitter gave Steve [...]

By: Bwana

Bwana — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 01:56:59 +0000

Wow, great site. I'll add that to my Twitter bookmarks. Thanks for the info!

By: Adriano

Adriano — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 01:23:11 +0000

I believe the only sites that currently access the full Twitter XMPP firehose are: Zappos, FriendFeed and Twittervision. (Please update me with any corrections.)

There is a nice mash-up http://www.monitter.com which will follow three keywords with optional geo parameter. Wish those parameters could be part of their URL stem. Latency is part and parcel though…

By: CannonGod

CannonGod — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:59:32 +0000

I would have agreed with you several months ago as I was using TwitterFeed to deliver RSS updates. It was archaically slow updating, thus loosing any real-time interest. However they must have sped things up because now I can't upload my photos and change their names on Flickr before the bastard has tweeted them out with their DSC.xxxxxx01.JPEG default! ^_^*

Now I haven't tried it recently with RSS search feeds from Summize, but it should be pretty quick as Summize auto-refreshes it's searches every minute or so. Worth another shot ;¬)

Welcome back to Twitter (at least for the time being!)

Also, how are you liking Apture?

By: aidanallen (Aidan Allen)

aidanallen (Aidan Allen) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:37:58 +0000

@Bwana intersting reson to come back on twitter if you are reading this and don’t know where to find the reson here: http://bit.ly/1OAk22

By: aidanallen (Aidan Allen)

aidanallen (Aidan Allen) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:37:58 +0000

@Bwana intersting reson to come back on twitter if you are reading this and don’t know where to find the reson here: http://bit.ly/1OAk22

By: Bwana (Bwana)

Bwana (Bwana) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:10:36 +0000

The Reason Why I’ve Returned to Twitter: Track is Dead http://bit.ly/1OAk22