Wow, yesterday was a Twitter day, wasn’t it? I’m going to have more about the LOC and Twitter later today or possibly tomorrow; right now I want to concentrate on Google’s Twitter announcements. There were two of which I think you should be aware.

Twitter Replays

The first is a “replay” feature for public Twitter posts. Look for it as “Updates” on the left options sidebar. This feature is still rolling out, so if you don’t see it check here. You’re still getting rolling updates of Twitter posts, but there’s also a chart at the top of the results that shows you a graph of mentions across time.

This chart only shows a couple days’ worth of mentions, but you can click on the time links above the chart (April, 2010) to expand the amount of time covered. You can also click on a specific area of the chart and get a list of tweets for that timespan. When you can get charts which cover enough time to have days delineated on them, you can click on the day to zoom in on it in particular. I couldn’t get it to zoom any further than that, however. You know what I missed and I would love? A word cloud associated with the tweets defined by the time in the chart, that would change as you accessed different sections of the timeline. It’s great that you can get entire tweets, of course, but wouldn’t it be great to see how a large volume of words changes and shifts as you move through a timeline?

Right now, this new replay feature only goes back to February 11, 2010, but eventually it’ll go back to the first tweet on March 21, 2006.

Google Follow Finder

The second Twitter related feature comes out of Google Labs and is called Google Follow Finder; you can use it at http://www.followfinder.googlelabs.com/. Just enter a Twitter username and you’ll get a list of suggested people to follow and a list of people with followers similar to the one. I tried searching for ResourceShelf, which puts out a lot of informative tweets.

Recommended followers on the left, Twitterers with similar followers on the right. I’m not overwhelmed; I’m not even particularly impressed. It’s great that you can see the most recent tweet from an account, but silly that you can’t see a bio. Only five results in each category on a page? Feh! I don’t think I’ll use this again. If I want to find people to follow with common interests I’ll use Twiangulate or Listorious.