Something seems to be going on with Twitter Search. ...or more correctly - something is not going on at Twitter Search. Old tweets appear to have disappeared. Twitter search is broken and the digital footprint from events have disappeared. This is really bad news for many people. Twitter search has become our memory jogger - a place we go to to pick up on the threads of past conversations.
As an example HealthcampMd took place on June 19th - a few short weeks ago, yet there is only one tweet in search from 6 days ago.
If you are covering an event this is bad news. The lasting digital footprint is an important outcome from an event. Is twitter just throwing their history away, or are they focusing resources on the real-time part of search? We need to know!
If you are running an event there is something you can do. I have used CoverItLive on a number of occasions. Thankfully I did this for the HealthCampMd event. CoverItLive is a great service that can aggregate the conversations going on at an event. They don't appear to throw away the history like Twitter is currently doing.
Here is their history of the HealthCampMd event.
BTW - Thanks to SocialText for hosting HealthCamp event sites and the site for http://healthca.mp. Thanks to them we are just in the process of setting up HealthCampToronto for September 16th. They create a great collaboration environment and their SocialText Desktop AIR application is a really nice feature as an event gets closer and traffic on the HealthCamp event site increases. Check out the demo here.
