Flocking.me Makes Twitter Search Personal

Flocking.me is a Twitter tool made specifically for searching through your friends’ tweets. In addition, you can also view trending topics from just your friends as well. This is a feature I really enjoy because it seems like lately the Twitter trends are polluted with irrelevant topics. With Flocking.me, trends are displayed across the top of the page making them hard to miss. The timeline is not updated in real-time but you will see a notification up top letting you know when there are new tweets, and how many there are.

Flocking.me uses Twitter OAuth for secure login. Once your account is authorized, you’ll see your homepage which will look very similar to your Twitter.com homepage. This is because the homepage uses the same background from your Twitter.com account.

There are three different homepage views to choose from – there’s the regular timeline view, a grid view, and a map view powered by Google (see pictures below). The one thing I don’t like about the timeline is that there are no internal features for replying, retweeting or adding a tweet to favorites. Instead, the reply icon (when clicked) sends you to Twitter.com in a new tab to send an @mention.

Timeline

Grid

Map

The main feature, the search bar, is not very fancy. It’s just a simple search bar where you have to enter a keyword, topic, brand, company, etc. There are no suggestions that pop up as you’re typing or advanced search options. Search results can also be viewed in timeline, grid and map form. Results shown are, of course, only from those that you are following.

Though I do like the direction in which Flocking.me is going, I feel that it needs a lot of work. How about you?

Written by Charnita Fance from Social Web Tools
Posted on December 26th, 2009 and filed under Social Media
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