I have become a big fan of using Twitter. You can follow my tweets by choosing to follow @joswalt on Twitter. For those that may not know what Twitter is, Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? There are numerous applications out that will allow you to create your Tweets (posts).
There are desktop applications such as Twhirl, TweetDeck, Twitterrific (Mac) to perform your tweeting. Browser addons such as TwitterFox connect you from the browser. You can even keep up to date with your friends on your mobile device through apps such as Tiny Twitter and GPS Twit.
After using Twitter for quite a while, I found myself searching for old tweets from my friends that contained links or information that I was interested in but didn't write down at the time that I read the tweet. I found that Twitter has a search site - search.twitter.com where you can search through tweets. I thought that it would be useful to create a Search Provider for Internet Explorer so that I could perform these searches directly from the Internet Explorer Search Bar.
Here are the steps to add a Twitter Search Provider to Internet Explorer:
- From within Internet Explorer 7, click on the dropdown arrow in the Search section of the toolbar and choose "Find More Providers..."
- After the Add Search Providers page loads, you are going to fill in the Create Your Own Search Provider section. In the URL textbox, enter "http://search.twitter.com/search?q=TEST" (without quotes). You then need to specify a name for your search provider. I chose to enter "Twitter".
- Click on the Install button to add the Twitter Search Provider to your list in Internet Explorer. You are then able to select "Twitter" in your Search section before performing a search.
- Now, just enter the term that you want to search on in Twitter such as searching for a person (joswalt) or a subject (Microsoft), and you will get sent to the Twitter search site with all of your search results provided for you.
You have now successfully added a Twitter Search Provider to Internet Explorer. Hopefully, you have found this post useful and start using Twitter to keep up to date with what your friends and family are doing.
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