The Latest Technical News

Twitter is all about facilitating conversations, but until you’re following some people, it’s just a blank page. Once you find people to follow and talk to, however, Twitter becomes exceptionally useful. You can share thoughts, ask questions, get updates about news, music, brands, and businesses, and discover helpful links and information. Finding good people to follow, especially for new users staring at a blank page the first time they log in, can be a bit daunting, though.
Thankfully, there are a number of ways you can find people on Twitter. Here are ten sites you can use to locate “tweeps” to follow. Let us know in the comments if you know of any others.

People Search

1. Twitter People Search – Twitter’s built in people search isn’t the greatest way to find people on Twitter, but it’s probably where you should start. Twitter searches the “real names” people enter in their bio fields, but because there isn’t much accompanying bio information and because Twitter doesn’t have any sort of requirement to use your actual name, that can make it a bit difficult to find people, especially those with common names. It also makes it hard to verify that the people you find are actually who you’re looking for. Still, it’s a good place to begin your search.
2. Tweepz – Because the biographical information Twitter collects is minimal, no Twitter people search engine can improve on Twitter’s that much. Third-party site Tweepz does an admirable job, though. Tweepz lets you limit searches to specific parts of Twitter’s user information (like name, bio, and location), filter results by follower/following numbers, location, and other extracted terms, and greatly improves on the layout of the search results.
3. TweepSearch – TweepSearch lets you search by Twitter name or location, or search a specific username to get a list of all friends and followers. However, if the “indexing” number listed on their main page is accurate, they’re crawling about 600,000 less Twitter user profiles than Tweepz.
4. TwitDir – TwitDir is another search engine, but if the crawling stats are accurate, it’s well behind the curve, searching about 3 million fewer users than Tweepz. Still, it’s not a bad people search engine, and has some helpful “top” lists if you’re concerned with who the most popular or prolific people on Twitter are (then again, they’re also not that up-to-date — the site doesn’t seem to know who @aplusk is, for example).

Directories

5. Twellow – Your best bet for finding like-minded Twitter users might be to use a directory, and Twellow is certainly one of the most complete. Nearly 6 million Twitter user profiles are indexed in Twellow and placed into a huge number of categories. You can search the entire lot of profiles, or confine searches to a single category. Twellow also operates a local directory called the “Twellowhood.”
6. WeFollow – Created by Digg founder Kevin Rose, WeFollow is a Twitter user directory that organizes people by hashtags. WeFollow is user-generated and anyone can add themselves by tweeting @wefollow with three #hashtags that describe them.
7. Just Tweet It – Just Tweet It is another user created Twitter directory. It’s not quite as well organized or easy-to-use as Twellow or WeFollow, but it is certainly large enough that you should give it a browse when trying to locate people in your interest areas to follow.

Recommendations

8. Twubble – Twubble recommends people to follow by spidering the people you’re already following and recommending users that they’re following. The idea is that the people you’re following are interesting to you, so if more than one of them are also following another person, that person might also be interesting. Of course, that means that Twubble can’t be your first stop when finding people to follow — you already need to be following some people for the service to work.
9. Twitterel – Twitterel attempts to find people you might be interested in following by doing keyword searches of tweets. The service can update you by email, direct message, or @reply when it finds new people it thinks you might be interested in following. It’s kind of like Google Alerts for Twitter follow recommendations.
10. Who Should i Follow? – Enter you Twitter username into Who Should i Follow? and the service finds users who are similar to those you’re already following. The site doesn’t disclose information about how it works, but in my experience it is pretty accurate at finding users whose tweets are similar in content to your followers. The results can be filtered by how popular the people are, and how close they are to a specific location.
BONUS: Mr. Tweet – Mr. Tweet is a very popular Twitter app that lets you give and receive recommendations about Twitter users. The app also provides more helpful statistics about users, such as tweets per day or the percentage of tweets containing links. To get the most out of Mr. Tweet, consider installing the Firefox plugin, which gives you access to statistics and user recommendations while you’re browsing Twitter.

More Twitter resources from Mashable:

- 19 Twitter Desktop Apps Compared
- 6 Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations
- Top 7 Twitter Tutorials on YouTube
- 5 Ways Twitter Can Save You Money
Reviews: Digg, Twellow, Twitter, WeFollow
Tags: Just Tweet It, people search, tweepsearch, tweepz, twellow, twitdir, twitter, twitterel, twubble, wefollow, who should i follow



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Google received some unfortunate news today, with the U.S. Department of Justice formally announcing the investigation of the $125 million settlement Google made with the Author’s Guild to pay authors a nominal fee for copyrighted works it has scanned and made available on the Web. The settlement has drawn its fair share of critics, including Jeff Bezos. But Google keeps on plugging away, making its book search better and better.
For instance, Google Books recently launched a plethora of new and innovative features to make the product easier for consumers to use, such as embeddable previews and better in-book search. Today, it added one more useful feature relating to search: a visual cue on the right margin showing the pages throughout a book where a search term appears.
When you search within a book, a page appears in a window, with a scrollbar on the right. Little rectangles will appear in the margin beside the scrollbar to show you where your results are located. When your mouse hovers over one of the rectangles indicating where a search term can be found in the book, you’ll get a preview of the search results and the option of jumping directly to that respective page by clicking on the rectangle.
With the previous search function, it wasn’t as easy to find the exact location of the results in a book. With this simple tweak, Google has improved the visual display of search functions, helping users navigate results in a more organized and efficient way. The DOJ will probably hold that against it.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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We know you’ve got questions, and if you’re brave enough to ask the world for answers, here’s the outlet to do so. This week’s Ask Engadget question is coming to us from Sang-Jung, who is desperately in search of the perfect cordless critter to take some of the strain away from that trackpad.”I’m heading to university next year, and I’ve purchased a MacBook. I’m also taking my four year old desktop, just in case I’m left with no computers when the MacBook is being repaired or whatnot. With only two USB ports on a MacBook, I want a Bluetooth mouse. Budget is about $100, and of course, it needs OS X support. Thanks for the help!”Alright folks, it’s time to get serious. Do you own a Bluetooth mouse that you can recommend? Recommend against? Be sure to spill your thoughts in comments below, and feel free to send in a question of your own to ask at engadget dawt com.Filed under: Ask Engadget, PeripheralsAsk Engadget: Best Bluetooth mouse out there? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments[Read more...]

This past April, AOL began testing out a social toolbar for web sites, under the name of a lifestreaming service called Socialthing, which it acquired in 2008. The toolbar is now going through a rough transition into something else, although it’s not totally clear what’s happening. At least judging by the live test that AOL has been running on its country music site The Boot. The Socialthing name has been dropped (and some features broken) in favor of a new name: AIM Connect.
The Socialthing toolbar has let people sign in with AIM, ICQ or Bebo identities and chat with friends on that service without leaving the site hosting the toolbar. You could also see a stream of comments and activity from whatever site you were on, as well activities of your friends on other sites from around the web. It let you read and share information with other sites, similar to Meebo’s toolbar and more generally like Facebook’s, Digg’s and others. See my more in-depth look — I actually came away somewhat impressed.

But while the old toolbar offered a right-hand window that let you see your buddies’ activity on other sites, that feature now seems to be broken. It doesn’t actually show anything except very old and random updates from AIM — notice the identical chat in the old and new screenshots. On the left-hand side, a way to chat with other users on the same site is now gone. And, if you click on the AIM Connect button on the left-hand side, you get taken to an information page about the service, with almost identical content to the original Socialthing toolbar information page. I’ve never heard of AIM Connect before, and neither has my Google search, so I guess that’s the forthcoming name.
So, what we seem to have here is a product in a rough transition. The Boot gets more than 1 million users a month, according to Compete — although traffic has halved since the toolbar went live in March. Maybe its users don’t like having a half-broken feature being live-tested on their site? AOL, of course, is in the middle of going through a much more fundamental transition. Perhaps, as with chat service Userplane, the brokenness is a temporary aspect of new chief executive Tim Armstrong coming through, meeting the employees, booting executives, and figuring out the company’s long-term product strategy.
In the  meantime, here’s what AOL tells me:
We are making some updates to the experience which are still underway. Stay tuned for some additional changes. As always we are committed to providing great products to consumers.

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Filed under: iPhoneWhile most of us at TUAW (in the US, anyway) are staring out the window, running down the clock to hit the lake or ocean or pavement in some manner, the intrepid bloggers of Engadget never take a vacation. Here are three* iPhone stories they posted today:Apple patent applications offer glimpses of haptic screens, RFID readers, fingerprint IDOh man, haptics on the iPhone would be so sweet, and finally give us a little more than annoying clicks when typing. RFID and fingerprints? Well, that I’m not so keen on.Apple patching nasty iPhone SMS vulnerabilityGood ol’ security maven Charlie Miller poked into the soft underbelly of the iPhone and discovered a pretty gnarly SMS hack that could potentially have your phone activating GPS, the phone’s mic, and other nastiness. Perfect setup for a Tom Clancy novel or totally scary vulnerability? Read the HotHardware piece and see for yourself.iPhone facing potential trademark issues in China?Yeah, who’d have thunk there would be a trademark dispute over the name iPhone in China, right? Funny thing is, Apple has a trademark on iPhone in China… just not on mobile phones. Oops.[Thanks to the tipsters who sent these in a while ago, there's fresh beer in the fridge in the garage!]*OK, four stories. MG Siegler over at TechCrunch has a linkalicious report on Facebook’s upcoming new iPhone app featuring… video uploads! (gasp, applause, nausea, use as directed)TUAWBecause you can never have enough iPhone news… three more stories originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments[Read more...]

Well, that’s a surprise. Rumors had pointed at Sprint to be the home of the Hero here in the states - but there it sits in the FCC database, packed to its big ol’ chin with AT&T-friendly 850/1900Mhz bands.
[Via EngadgetMobile]
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According to a report today from the BBC, Iranians are able to text message one another for the first time since the day before the presidential elections.

SMS service, which political dissidents had used to spread messages and organize protests, has been restricted since June 11, causing many Iranians to use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social sites to broadcast and communicate.
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The BBC report stated that, according to Iranian news outlets, SMS capabilities are now unblocked but that users are experiencing massive technical problems. Some messages as old as three weeks were just now being received, and some messages were delivered multiple times.

Iran’s broken digital communication infrastructure caused many Iranians to turn to services such as Twitter, using proxies to work around government restrictions for web use. Twitter became so integral to Iranians’ communication, particularly with the wider global community, that the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance which would have occurred in the immediate aftermath of the election and resultant protests. Other services rushed to add Persian translation features.

Hopefully, the unblocking of text messaging in Iran is a sign that communication channels are returning to normal. So, does this mean that everyone’s new favorite color, “Solidarity Green,” will begin to fade away from social web avatars sometime soon? Once the country and its government emerge from crisis mode, what news will come from Iran, and what will the Internet have to say about it?
Discuss



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