Ever wanted to find an old tweet, but couldn't? That's because most Twitter search engines only go back about a week.
You probably tried to find, say, "flashy new widget", via TweetDeck, HootSuite, or other twitter clients that use Twitter Search behind the scenes. But they don't mention the fact that it only goes back a week, so the results don't find anything, and you're sitting there wondering, "did I dream that, or is Twitter just borked?!!"
Also, Twitter Search (including the API) searches _all_ of Twitter, whereas the tweet probably came from someone you follow already.
Enter Refynr.com.
- It already backs up tweets (and Facebook posts) from people you follow based on your keywords, so the history is there if you've already been using Refynr for a while.
- It also saves all the tweets you made, Direct Messages (DMs), and mentions/replies of your Twitter account.
- As of last night, Refynr added a feature to search within your saved Refynr Stream; so, if Refynr matched on a keyword from your Social Networks, you can find those old tweets/posts with a simple search box
- Want to see all tweets from you or about you? Just enter you twitter username as the search term
- Want to see all the tweets within your network that match the #programming hash tag? Just enter "#programming" (without the quotes)
- Want to see all the interesting FB posts from your family? Just enter "[your last name]" (assuming it's not a common last name)
- Other uses?
CAVEAT 1: this is a brand new feature, and so it's only Alpha quality, which means it's slow and probably has bugs
CAVEAT 2: it's not using a fancy search engine behind the scenes (yet!), but is only doing mySQL "LIKE" comparisons on usernames and tweets/post text. This means that you can't expect it to do any "fuzzy" matching like a Google search would do. It's only good for simple text string matches. For example, if you search for "program", then "program", "programming", & "programmer" would be returned.... but.... if you search for "ColdFusion programming", it has to match that string exactly, so don't expect the search to return results that have either "ColdFusion" OR "programming" OR "programmer", etc.
Test it out, and let me know.
