Using Twitter to Bookmark

Ever since Furl was taken over by Diigo, I’ve been using StumbleUpon to bookmark my favorite pages. There are lots of great social bookmarking services out there, and the most popular ones are: Mixx, Reddit, Digg, and Delicious. But have your ever tried bookmarking with Twitter?

Twitter is a micro-blogging service but I recently discovered that it is also good for bookmarking.

Here’s how:

1. Drag and drop this button: TwitThis to your browser’s shortcuts toolbar.
2. Just click the ‘TwitThis’ button if you wish to tweet/bookmark a page.
3. Your Twitter account will pop up and just choose how would you like to tweet the page (Reading:, Check out, Watching:, etc.)
4. Mark your tweet as favorite and your done.
5. If you wish to retrieve tweeted/bookmarked pages, just go to your ‘favorites’ tab.
   

Twitter might not be as good as most bookmarking services, but it can do a good job for quick bookmarking. especially if you installed apps like TweetDeck. I’m in fact using Twitter more often these days to bookmark my pages, and I really love it because it’s so easy and simple.

Brand Monitoring in Twitter: BackTweets Alerts you to Linking Activity

Most businesses who are trying to stay on top of what’s being said about them (or their competition) are very familiar with Twitter’s standard search engine. Search.twitter.com will provide a reasonably comprehensive set of results for term and hashtag references, but that may not be enough for businesses who need to stay on top of all relevant conversations.

One shortcoming of Twitter’s standard search is that it will fail to catch those tweets that may have linked to your/your competition’s site, yet don’t contain the specific terms or tags that you are probing for.

Imagine that someone has tweeted only the words “my favorite latte” and has provided a link to the coffee house you own. In this instance no key terms were used, and you’d likely never know that the reference ever existed.

(Click the image for a larger view.)

Enter Backtweets. With Backtweets, you simply enter a URL (the service will auto-resolve shortened ones) into the single field presented and hit return. It will deliver a reverse-chronological list of tweets containing the requested link.

In addition, it provides an RSS feed so that you can be notified automatically as new relevant tweets appear. If you would prefer to receive the updates via email, one option is to enter the feed URL into a service such as FeedMyEmail, who will send you a daily email.

The creators of Backtweets tell me that service will provide up to 500 results for any single search result at one time, and searches for links going back about 2 months.

Our sentiment is that Backtweets is an invaluable addition to the toolkit of any professional who needs to stay on top what’s being said on Twitter.

Google Execs: Twitter-like Functionality Could Be Added to Search

While taking questions yesterday about alleged violation of anti-trust laws, Google execs including CEO Eric Schmidt reportedly told press that the company is, in the words of Reuters scribe Alexei Oreskovic, "looking at ... ways of integrating microblogging capabilities, such as those popularized by Twitter, into its search product."

That's news to us. Everything these days is about Twitter, though. Go to a party--talk about Twitter. Have a blog? Talk about Twitter. Use Twitter? Talk about Twitter. Apparently we can add to that: facing legal pressure over allegedly anti-competitive business practices? Talk about Twitter. There's absolutely no more information available about this - but below are three possible scenarios we can imagine for Google integrating microblogging into its search product.

The fact that Schmidt said what he did is just one reason to believe Google is going to do something with microblogging. There are several - most important is the fact that status sharing and activity streams are really useful, compelling and potentially valuable for both users and companies that dabble in them. Here's how it might go down.