So it seems I am not the only one missing the Track feature of Twitter. Sean Bonner mentioned the same thing in his latest update on how he is using it:
The most notable is that they pulled down the “track” feature which was really my favorite thing they ever did. Honestly I can’t wait for them to bring it back online because without it Twitter is about 10% as functional for me as it was previously. Luckily there are a few services like Summize which allow you to see who is talking about things you might be interested in but that requires going to the site and running specific searches for each keyword.
After reading this I realized I had all the pieces of the solution, I just had not put them together.
As I said on Sean’s site, given Twitter are prioritizing restoring IM, I think it will be a while before Track is re-enabled.
So here is an elaboration of the steps I left in the comment, that should help us all cope in the interim.
How to use Summize and the DPA to emulate Twitter’s Track feature
- This builds off the Digital Personal Assistant I documented over on Grinding.be. If you have already done that, skip ahead. Otherwise, go through the steps laid out in Creating your digital personal-assistant; basically just a new Twitter account, populated via a Twitterfeed account.
- Go to Summize. Enter each keyword you were tracking and get Summize’s RSS Feed for that (it is on the TopRightHand of the screen). Add each RSS feed to the Twitterfeed account you are using to populate your Digital Assistant account.
- Lastly, just ensure you have SMS notifications turned on when you are heading away from the keyboard; this will also work when IM is fully restored, but Track is not.
Twitterfeed has a minimum poll-rate of thirty minutes, so you still won’t get exactly instant notifications, but it will be close to it.
