14 DAY TRIAL // Besides becoming hugely popular with a large set of people, Twitter has actually become a necessity for many users. Unfortunately, the service has been very slow to bring any kind of new features and has even removed some older ones. One of them is the possibility to keep track of a particular search word, which, though available at the beginning, was removed, as it couldn't scale at the rate Twitter was growing. A number of third-party services has been trying to bring it back in one form or another, and Exclaim Track's solution is particularly simple and elegant.
Twitter search is known for its serious limitations. It's good for some basic functionality, but, for those not wanting to constantly have a Twitter page opened and constantly refresh it in order to stay up-to-date, it isn't a real option. There are several solutions, some others, web-based, integrated into dedicated clients, from third-parties, but Exclaim stands out in the way it delivers the updates, through instant messaging.
The service is only available for Google Talk (or any Jabber account) for now and setting it up is as easy as it gets. All users have to do is add [email protected] to their contacts list. After that, all it takes is to send it a message saying “track [keyword]” and it starts sending in all the tweets containing the search term through the same chat window.
Untracking a term is just as easy and it works by sending it an IM saying “remove [keyword].” Also interesting is that, if the stream of updates becomes overwhelming at some point or, for any other reason, users want to stop receiving updates but don't remove the tracked term, they can just send “off” and “on” to pause or start the stream.
The underlying technical solution is also interesting. The Track service is part of Excla.im, a service that allows users to send out a tweet through IM and the tracking service was set up using, almost exclusively, a Google solution. It uses Pubsubhubbub for the real-time pinging and Superfeedr for the feed parsing. Finally, the service was deployed using Google Apps.