I have been covering Twitter tools more and more on ResearchBuzz. You might be wondering why. Here’s why: because Twitter, with its millions of users sending out tens of millions of tweets, is a great source to monitor for information and links. And there are some amazing people out there holding useful conversations. So you’re going to get see more Twitter tool coverage here, because whether you personally want to use it or not it’s an important information stream. (And you personally do not have to use it to take advantage of it as an information stream.)

I am always looking for interesting people to follow on Twitter so I appreciated learning about Twiangluate, at http://twiangulate.com. Besides sounding like it must have been founded by Elmer Fudd, Twiangulate lets you enter two or three Twitter users and find common followers between them.

Say I’m interested in tweets on genealogy. On the front page of Twiangulate, I enter the tweeters @Cyndislist, @Dickeastman, and @Megansmolenyak, all respected genealogy peeps. Twiangulate thinks about it for a moment and gives me the following search result:

What you get is a list of who the people you entered are following in common. My idea was that if I followed people who had a topic in common then the people they followed would have that same topic in common, and for the most part it was true; the list was full of professional genealogists and sites/tools of use to genealogists. The list includes the person’s avatar, a brief description if they have one (be sure to fill out your Twitter bio!), the number of followers they have as well as the number of people following. You can also see where they’re twittering from if they’ve made that information available.

Now, you will have to have a wedge to start your searching; it may be amusing to see who @davewiner and @maddow are following in common but it might not give you any topical follower ideas. You might want to use a directory like WeFollow.com to find tweeters on a given topic then run them through Twiangulate to find more. A useful tool, though I can see how it would turn into a timesink!