The growth of Twitter is documented, some kind of amazing. My goodness, it even made the cover of Time Magazine (of course, who reads print magazines anymore when you can craft a well-designed Twitter feed?).

Growing concurrently at an equally hyper rate are the various Twitter Apps.  It has gotten so big, so fast in fact that we actually had to create another “Twitter Search” channel just to accommodate all the new players.

ButtonALL gives you access to all of these wonderful Twitter search tools from one place, one page.  We think it’ll make a fantastic time-saving, research tool to track specific trends making their way through the cultural zeitgeist.

Here is a summary of ButtonALL’s two Twitter channels:

Twitter Channel 1

• Twitter (Wikipedia | Twitter | Crunchbase) Makes sense to start with this one. Twitter’s search engine DNA comes from Summize, a Virginia-based company! that Twitter acquired last year.
• CrowdEye (Twitter | Crunchbase) Real-time social search engine that aggregates results in various list and visual summarizations (frequencies, link popularity, tags popularity, etc).
• Topsy (Twitter | Crunchbase) A search engine that weighs search results by Twitter linking activity (quantity and quality of referral). RT = Relevance.
• Scoopler (Wikipedia | Twitter | Crunchbase) A “real-time search engine” that indexes a number of social media sources like Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more. Great for searching breaking stories as they happen.
• BackTweets (Twitter | Crunchbase) This is a nice tool to track URLs by searching for tweets containing that particular link. Observe how the Twitter community is re-tweeting (RTing) and reacting to a web page.

Twitter Channel2

• Twazzup (Twitter | Crunchbase) Human-assisted Twitter search engine. Think Mahalo meets Twitter search. Includes a “most popular” side bar.
• Tweet Scan (Twitter | Crunchbase) Microblogging search engine that scans Twitter, identi.ca and other Laconica-based sites.
• Twellow (Twitter | Crunchbase) Sort of a Twitter yellow pages/directory where you can find people and organizations by subject categories, expertise, or personal attributes.
• Tweetag (Twitter | Crunchbase) A Twitter search engine that emphasizes 40 of the most frequent tags (”#s”) being discussed. The more it’s discussed, the heavier the search result weighting.
• Twicsy (Twitter | Crunchbase) A photo search engine that looks for pictures being shared on Twitter (ie, twitpics).

To add the Twitter Search Engine Channels to your ButtonALL, you can go to the customization screen and drop down on Blogs:: Twitter Search.

Remember, in the customization screen, you can always add, delete, and re-arrange channel orders (via drag n drop).

Bibiliography

• CNET’s Webware: Twitter search sites: The three best, and all the rest
• Mashable: Do We Really Need Twitter Search Alternatives?
• Phil Bradley’s weblog: Twitter Search - 20 alternative search enginess

Third channel?? Yes, while researching for this article, I came across another set of good Twitter search candidates/resources.  Gonna need a bigger boat.

I’ve been sitting on this one for a while (patiently waiting for a fifth search engine to emerge).  Enter Tweetag (thanks TechCrunch!).

Here are the inaugural five (subject to change…any others out there?):

• Twitter (official)  There is an undeniable need to search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through our service. (author’s note: We love the fact that Summize came out of Virginia!)
• Twitter Troll A search engine strictly for indexing and searching Twitter posts.
• Tweetag Tweetag gives you a unique way to browse through all the public tweets published on Twitter.com  By selecting certain tags, you can also define the scope of your search and discover new topics related to them
• Twellow Twellow.com is able to assist you in finding real people who really matter. We’re doing the hard work of sifting out people who can help bring your vision to reality, whatever that vision might be.
• Twitter Scan In the innovative world of Microblogging, one site aims to organize it all. Tweet Scan searches Twitter, identi.ca and other Laconica-based sites with more being added all the time.

To add the Twitter Search channel to your ButtonALL you can go to the customization screen and scroll down on Blogs :: Twitter Search. OR just click here (click once, or it’ll continue to add this search row. Remember, you can always delete and re-arrange in the customization section)

ButtonALL is definitely twittering…What a perfect medium to make mini-announcements without committing to a long-winded blog post.

We have been using Twitter to announce new channels as soon as they become live.  Here is a compilation of our channel announcement twitters from this week (misspellings and all!)…

• FAQ-Walkthrough-Cheats Channel is Live!: GameFAQs, Strategy Informer, GameWinners, GamerHelp, GameSpy…
• Video Game News Channel…IGN, GameSpot, Kotaku, Joystiq, 1UP.com…Video Game Walkthrough/FAQ coming next!
• Meme-Slang-Urban Legends Channel…What the heck is Leroy Jenkins, Mudkips, and 1337?…Now you can interpret those damn kids… 
• Meta-Search Channel is Live!: Mamma, Clusty, Search.com, Info.com, Myriad Search…
• Four Otaku channels (not be confused w 4Chan) added courtesy of Laz…Merch, Culture, Blogs, and Figures: http://blog.buttonall.com/?p=62 
• Dude, I am in the channel zone right now…just completed Stock Search Channel…google, yahoo, msn, CNNMoney, Wall Street Journel
• New York Media Chanel 2 (man, lots of papers in the big apple)…Star-Ledger, Newsday, NY Magazine, Gothamist, (and Time Out)
• Charity Search Engines Channel…Longer writeup… http://blog.buttonall.com/?p=56  
• SEO Tools ChanneL: Quantcast, Compete, Whois.net, Arin IP, Network Solutions…Ridiculously Useful!
• Technology 2 Channel ONLINE: ReadWriteWeb, GigaOM, O’Reilly Radar, Techmeme, AllThingsD…

Considering we updated the customization navigation (to accommodate all these new channels) and added a neat ButtonALL search toolbar application (I think Wray is going to blog about this), I say this was a pretty darn good productive week.  Kudos to the 4What team!