Explore The Twitter : Advanced Search, Image Upload & More

T witter is a much loved social network. But it is one of those very few uber popular crowd favorites that sees hardly any new feature add...

twitter

Twitter is a much loved social network. But it is one of those very few uber popular crowd favorites that sees hardly any new feature additions. Twitter team isn’t known for pushing updates and new features at the appropriate time. Unlike Facebook where something exciting is introduced every other week, Twitter updates usually show up once in a blue moon.

That’s exactly why I was surprised to a see a whole lot of new features roll in these past few days, one after another. From an in depth search option to photo uploading and a new follow button for websites, there is a feature targeting every user group. Let’s check them out!

Twitter Photos

Uploading images is a long awaited feature. Since it wasn’t available, users were forced to use third party apps like Twitpic and Yfrog to share their images. Both these services have garnered sizable traction and revenue and were taking some sheen out of Twitter’s brand and popularity. So this doesn’t come as a surprise feature. However, the interesting thing to note is that the service isn’t powered by Twitter’s own infrastructure.

Images are uploaded and served from the severs of the popular image sharing and upload service Photobucket. But, it isn’t necessary to have a separate account at Photobucket to upload images and the images aren’t cross posted at their service as well. This feature is slowly being rolled out to everyone and currently works with the web app and not in the official mobile apps.

Advanced Search

Twitter didn’t have a search option at launch and was the case for a long time before it acquired the third party Twitter search engine Summize. Till now the search feature was pretty bare bones and mostly relegated to searching for words in the tweets. But I must admit that I was blown away by the comprehensiveness of the newly launched Advanced Search options.Twitter-Advanced-Search

Now you can search not only for tweets, but also can choose to search with or eliminate multiple keywords ala. Google Search. People search option in the same page helps you find accounts based on their account names and mentions.

Searching based on the mood of the tweets is a cool new addition. By searching for smiles like :( or :)  , you can try to ascertain the pulse of the Twittersphere. You can search for Tweets including question marks too.

Place-Search

Searching for tweets based on location is a fun feature you should really try. Tweets that have geo location information are searched and the search radius can be narrowed down to the exact distance that you have in mind.

Follow Button

This one is a very late addition, but is a very useful indeed. It does a better job than the FacebookLike button. It’s not easy for you to discover the Twitter accounts of your favorite reporters, athletes, celebrities, and other personalities. With the Follow button enabled, you can now see the tweets of the celebrity along with a option to follow them in as simple as a single click.

Follow-Button

The best use case I could see from the launch partners was the implementation at IMDB. Being a movie buff, I always had the problem of discovering not only the accounts of my favorite stars, but also to determine the legitimacy of the account. Now, it’s just a walk in the park!

A lot of popular blogs and websites have integrated this functionality and if you are looking forward to add this to your own web page, head over here to get your embed code.

Automatic URL Shortener

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Short URLs are a major source spam in Twitter and often they tend to contain malicious links. Links in your tweets will now automatically be shortened to 19 characters with Twitter’s own t.co service.  As an added perk, all shortened URLs will be cross checked with the database of malicious URLs to ensure that all links stay clean. Nice!

 

[Originally Written By Justin Stravarius]

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