

Ask HN: What would normal people do with Twitter search? - webwright

I am not a Twitter hater.  I enjoy using it ( @webwright) and think it has a bright future.<p>I see lots and lots of people talking about how amazing realtime search is.  Clearly, it's a boon to PR folks, marketeers, etc.  And it's interesting from a real-time citizen-news angle.  I see how it's cool at conferences/events.  And it's fabulous for tracking celebrities.<p>But can someone run through some use cases showing how normal people would use it every day?
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dangoldin
Just a few ideas of the top of my head:

\- If some service stops working (some website or phone system), people can
get on to twitter and find out if others are having the same issues.

\- You can use it to keep track of various sports teams. See what the players
are up to and how the various games are going without having a TV.

\- You can even have TV channels tuned to a specific "Search" depending on
your interests to get a pulse of what's going on (sports news, news from
different countries)

\- Combining these can give you a "build your own channel" tool that can give
you real time info.

\- Another idea may be to convert it to something similar to a radio channel.
If there is ever a nice way of aggregating various tweets together by theme -
that might be a good way to be entertained.

There are probably a whole lot of other ideas that people can't even think of
yet but it'll definitely be interesting to see.

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jlees
It's pretty cool to have running while you're watching TV or something.
Watching the Apprentice backchannel while watching the Apprentice, etc. (Obama
inaug and Facebook did this well, too.)

About to buy something? Twitter search for a quick and dirty finger-in-air to
see whether you should rethink.

