Earlier this week I showed how to create a twitter search with thrudb.

The service has been running now for about a week and it’s collected over 8 million tweets. I’ve run some stats on the lucene db and these are the top 100 words with more than 3 letters :)

I’ve been using twitter quite a bit lately and really like the simplicity of the service and api. One thing thats missing though is search, but there are some great sites like tweetscan and summize that let you search public tweets in close to real-time.

I decided indexing twitter is a great application for thrudb, specifically the thrudex service. Thrudex is essentially a Thrift service for CLucene with some special sauce added. If you’d like to read about the inner workings read this.

Anyway, I whipped up a demo (in perl) for a realtime twitter search and have indexed a few days of tweets (over 3 million!) . check it out here.

One of our regular contributers, Thai Duong, was kind enough to port it to python+django for you new school folks.
*Note* this is running on a single dev box, so be forgiving… It’s currently polling the public timeline feed so it’s not going to catch every tweet. but It captures ~85%
We’ve added the code as a tutorial for thrudb here. Take it and build your own service… Any takers on building a ruby version or a cross site social search aggregation ala friendfeed?

Jott.com is the most useful website I’ve seen in a while.  It’s simple… link your jott account to your phone number.   Leave a message to yourself or another contact and it gets converted to text and emailed.

I created an account for my father today.  He has never been very good with computers but he always gets asked to email clients and family.  With Jott he was able to email three people in a couple of minutes.  The quality of the transcription is very good. From what I’ve read they automate the transcripton with software then send unknown phrases to live transcribers who clean up the message.

Once I signed up for myself I instantly wanted to integrate this into other services esp. twitter.  Turns out they’ve added a development api to mashup their service with other services.  Twitter, Tumblr, Blogger, etc are supported. Works like a charm.

Def give this a try. It’s free and works in the US and CA