Monitter is a browser based Twitter search engine that is a bit reminiscent of TweetDeck, the popular desktop Twitter client. One of Tweetdeck’s most interesting features is that it can display a number of Twitter searches in parallel to each other, which is a great way of keeping track of a certain topic as it makes its way through Twitter. Monitter takes a similar approach and displays three constantly updated keyword searches parallel to each other in your browser.
Monitter is being developed by Alex Holt and has been online since July 27th.
Three Keywords – Three Languages
In its current state, Monitter is restricted to always displaying three keyword searches in three separate columns. Once you change the keywords, Monitter will display the last tweet with those keywords in it and then constantly update the search. In our tests, it never took more than 30 seconds before Monitter picked up on a new tweet.
One of the really cool features of Monitter is that you can filer tweets by language. Right now, those languages are English, Spanish, and German. Overall, those filters seemed to work very well. This does, however, also mean that you won’t see tweet in other languages, which is a bit of a limitation, but will probably only bother very few users.
As the folks over at Web Worker Daily point out, Monitter also works great in a site specific browser like Fluid on the Mac or Bubbles on the PC.
Widget
The Monitter team has also built an embeddable widget so that you can display these searches on your own site. Because of how wide the widget has to be, though, this approach might not be really useful for a lot of people.
Competition
There are, of course, various Twitter search engines available already. Summize, which was bought by Twitter and is now the standard Twitter search engine, is great way to search for specific keywords and allows you to reply to tweets right from the application. Twitscoop, which we reviewed about a month ago, is also a very capable Twitter search engine and features a very cool, constantly updating tag cloud.
Verdict
In terms of its features, one nice addition to Monitter would be the ability to reply to tweets right out of the application. Even more interesting would be the ability to send tweets right out of the app, which would, of course, make it even more of a TweetDeck for the browser (an inspiration that, by the way, the developer fully acknowledges). Also, it would be nice if you could turn off the language filtering.
Overall, though, Monitter is a cool and well designed way to monitor certain keywords on Twitter. It is not so much useful as a search engine, as it only displays the last tweet that matches your keywords. Its power is in constantly updating these search results, and while its competitors can do this as well, Monitter’s ability to track more than one search is often very useful. If you already use TweetDeck, this application might not be too useful for you. However, if you are using Twhirl or any other Twitter client, then you could do a lot worse than giving Monitter a try.
