The Twitter phenomenon is probably rather well known by anybody online now: a messaging service that can be your most immediate source of news items. I use it to share one-line news items, share when I posted a new blog post, or anything else that may be interesting to my friends and is just a short message not worthy of a full blog post.
For monitoring what is being said about a certain topic, brand, or even video, Twitter provides since recently a
search interface
. The default search return tweets from "just now". However, Twitter search has an awesome set of
very intuitive operators
that can be used with the search keywords. There are useful things such as putting a smiley
or
behind a query to indicate you want a tweet with a positive/negative attitude, or adding a since:{date} and/or until:{date} to indicate the time frame within which you wanted the tweets. I wished all of these operators were available for Google searches, too!
The only thing that is annoying about the Twitter search is that it doesn't resolve the tinyurls that people's long urls get turned into. Thus, it is impossible to search for links to, e.g. specific videos on YouTube. I think Twitter should implement that improvement and put both, the tinyurl link as well as the resolved url into their index for each post.