Tracking conversations about people, brands, ideas, topics, or any area of interest really, is a new part of my daily routine now that I can track all of these things in real time with using Twitter.
Over the weekend, I found myself hopping back and forth between several browser tabs doing Twitter searches for things like “bitly,” “quantum of solace,” and “bbq nyc”. Usually I monitor this sort of thing in Tweetdeck, but I was on a friend’s laptop and didn’t want to download the app. So I started writing some javascript, and ended up with a pretty cool tool called Convo Monitor.
Convo Monitor is a simple Twitter dashboard that allows you to view up to 10 searches on a single page. I wanted to keep things lightweight, so there’s no signup / account creation necessary. To save your Convo Monitor, you bookmark a link to the dashboard you created and load it up next time you want to check the Twitter conversations you’re tracking.
One of the cool things Convo Monitor can do because there are no accounts and everything is saved as part of the URL is dashboard sharing. If you make a dashboard of topics you think a friend or colleague may be interested in, you can just grab a bookmark to that page and Email or IM it to them.
I whipped up a quick screencast demo-ing some of the features of Convo Monitor. Here it is:
Setting up a dashboard tracking the topics I frequently check has saved me lots of time and Convo Monitor has become part of my routine. Post some dashboards to the comments if you come up with interesting ones.
Check out the app at www.convomonitor.com