Twitter is a massive public chat/status update/instant messaging facility. Among other things, it inspired the slightly different Facebook news feed and FriendFeed.

Thus, Twitter Search is a great way to keep track of what people worldwide are saying about things you care about. It’s like a hipper, more instant Technorati or Google Blog Search.

Say, you want to know what people are saying about politics. Alas, it is too popular a topic. The atom feed only gives us an hour or so of results.

Twitter provides an easy but hidden facility to get older results in the atom feed. Take your url:

And add a page parameter:

Boom! More results.

I’m playing with YQL and Yahoo Pipes to see what awesome things can be done with it. Pipes is certainly capable of merging multiple feeds into one, which is a start.

References

Twitter Search API