Your Tweets

Ever wanted to know your Twitter trends? Well now you can generate a cloud of all your tweets using Tweet Clouds. My Cloud is below. Clearly I need to stop replying to @npike so much.

My Tweet Cloud

Now that you know the words you use most frequently, wouldn’t it be nice to know how you used them? That’s where Tweet Scan comes in handy. In fact the tag cloud Tweet Cloud gets you has links but they go nowhere (every one just links to #, I’m not sure what that’s useful for…). This following is the Tweet Scan search results for Rochester for my username only.

Tweet Scan Results for Rochester for user Randyaa

Send a Kwiry From Your Cellphone

Kwiry Text LogoI hear and see things I want to remember all the time. I used the voice notes on my phone for a while but I always seemed to forget they were there. A few weeks ago I was thinking it would be great to be able to send a text message to store little things I think of throughout the day. I even tried writing an application that allows you to send text messages to Google Notebook. Unfortunately Google’s Data API doesn’t allow pushing data to Google Notebook so that was a bust.

A few days ago I found Kwiry which does exactly what I was looking for. Kwiry allows you to send a text message which is saved as a ‘kwiry’ (pronounced query) on their system. It then sends you a notification using any method you’d like including E-mail, SMS, RSS etc that you have a new saved kwiry. There is also a social aspect so you can see your friend’s kwiry’s and they can see yours. I find this feature completely useless and unwanted so I’ve disabled it by setting all my kwiry’s as private. Social networking doesn’t improve everything. Social networking is not a golden hammer even though most new services think it is.

Kwiry stores your texts in their system. Once they’re stored and you get notified (using whatever method you prefer) the links they provide send you to the Kwiry website itself which then gives you search results using your desired search engine.

I love Kwiry and it’s functionality but I’d much rather use it without logging into their system since the functionality it provides is really quite simple. To do this I’ve created a Yahoo Pipe that switches the links to point directly to the search engine of your choice. All you need is the base Search URL (Google’s would be http://google.com/search?q=) and the feed URL to your kwiry’s.

Use this Pipe to replace the links in your kwiry feed to your desired search engine.

Ask the winner

Ask.comA few days ago I was watching Webb Alert when she mentioned the search result differences between Google and Ask. It was clear that Ask is the winner. I couldn’t believe the difference. Take a Google search for the San Fransisco 49ers for example. The top Google search results are mostly sponsored links and ticket sales. Do the same search for the San Fransisco 49ers on Ask.com and you get much more meaningful results. In fact as you’re typing ask even suggests searches for you. Google has had Google Suggest for a long time but for some reason they’ve never pushed it into their main search.

Now that Ask has turned around, will Google see them as a threat and make some changes?