Recently, I've heard a couple of people ask how you can keep track of topics that are being Tweeted about, wondering if there's something like Google Alerts for it.

Twitter doesn't have anything built into it, so I decided to do some investigating. I've found a few possible solutions, but my favourite so far is using Outlook 2007, so I'm going to explain how to do that here. I'll write a post later with some of the other options.

Note: This solution, as written, only works with Outlook 2007, because it has a built-in feed reader. You can get third-party add-ins for earlier versions of Outlook to provide similar functionality, but I know nothing about them, so can't recommend a specific one to try.

The reason I like the Outlook solution is because once the tweets are in there, I can use all the Outlook functions with them just as if they're e-mails. For example, I can search through them for specific keywords, sort them by author, organize them by moving some into different folders, etc. And, I can keep them as long as I want. (I think...)

The steps I'm showing below will allow me to track all tweets related to gardening.

Enter "gardening" on the Twitter search page (search.twitter.com)

The search is not case-sensitive, so it will pick up tweets that refer to "Gardening" as well.

Click the Search button.

A page of tweets with the term "gardening" in them will appear.

Click the "Feed for this query" link at the top right.

A page will come up that will let you subscribe to the search results in your favourite feed reader, e.g. Bloglines, Google Reader, My Yahoo, etc. We don't want to do that, so:

Highlight the URL and click Ctrl + C to copy it.

In this case, the URL is http://search.twitter.com/search?q=gardening.

In Outlook, choose Tools > Account Settings > RSS Feeds.

Click the New icon.

In the dialog box that appears, press Ctrl + V to paste in the Twitter feed.

When you click Add, another dialog box will appear. It will have a default name but you can change it. I'm just calling mine "Gardening".

In the Delivery Location section, click the Browse Folder.

This will allow you to select a folder to have the feed delivered to. I already had a folder named Twitter in my Personal Folders, so I browsed to that location and then used the New Folder button to create a folder called (surprise!), Gardening.

Click OK until you've exited the RSS Feed Options dialog box.

I now have Gardening in my list of feeds.

Click the Close button.

If I scroll to my Gardening folder, I will see the list of tweets from my search. And, whenever my Outlook does a Send/Receive (either on schedule or manually), it will check for new tweets from this feed.

Note: Twitter has a limit of 15 items for their RSS feeds, so when you first do this, you'll only see the first page of search results in your folder. I haven't figured out if there's any way to add older ones so, if anyone knows, please shoot me an e-mail at Tips@TechForLuddites.com and I'll update this post. This also means that, if more than 15 tweets on your topic come in between your Send/Receive intervals, you may not get them all. I haven't tested this yet, so I'll add an update once I have. If this is the case, I think it would be more of a problem for more popular topics, like breaking news, than something that you're just following on an ongoing basis. (2/10/09: Okay, it's now tested... See the update below.)

*****

Updates

Okay, so this is what happens when you get excited about something and don't give it a little time to ruminate. I was so thrilled to find this Outlook solution that I didn't think about the OBVIOUS problem of Twitter's 15-item RSS limit, as in... you don't have Outlook open all the time! So any tweets that come in between the time you close it down and re-open it (like, say, when you go to bed each night), you won't be receiving the feed. And when you start it up again, you'll only get the 15 most recent items.

It turns out that I missed 32 gardening-related tweets that came in overnight. If this were a really hot topic, I probably would have missed hundreds. So clearly, this is NOT a solution that will find you every tweet on your topic of interest. However, it's still a good way to find a lot of them (assuming, like me, your Outlook client is open most of the day), so you should still be able to find new people that you'd like to follow, as well as pick up useful information related to your topic.

If I find a better way to solve this problem, I'll let you know. If YOU have a better way, please let ME know!

Posted in How To, MS-Outlook, Twitter