Having had Twitter search readily available from my Twitter home page for some time now, I had forgotten that this feature was not available to everyone yet. Sure, the feature was always available if you could find it, but having it right in the right-hand navigation column makes it that much more accessible.
Twitter SearchAccording to a post on the official Twitter Blog, the feature is in fact there for everyone now. In the post, co-founder Biz Stone discusses the importance of the feature.
“With this newly launched feature, Twitter has become something unexpectedly important—a discovery engine for finding out what is happening right now,” he says. “Twitter teaches us new and amazing things every day and a big lesson learned is that search is so much more than a box and a button. As public tweets fly in from around the globe, we analyze them to detect when certain words or phrases occur with higher frequency.”
Of course the trending topics are displayed underneath the search box, and provide a good indication of what topics are being widely discussed around the world. “Built on our search technology, trends are a compelling if rudimentary way to explore a collective global consciousness,” as Stone puts it.
Many people still have a hard time grasping what Twitter’s all about – hence the service’s low retention rate. Perhaps the general availability of search and trends from the home page will help some of these people find new ways Twitter can be useful for them.