Introducing Perkpipe: What are you searching for?

Perkpipe is a twitter search engine that allows online users to search and find most influential people & relevant tweets on social media platform Twitter, as the way we search relevant web pages on traditional web search engines.

Perkpipe was started in October, 2009; it was tested initially by answering a very simple question:

Could we search twitter users as the way we search web pages on Google?

Twitter users (a.k.a twitterers, tweeple or tweeters), are online micro-blogging users who use twitter for communications & conversations. Here at Perkpipe, we want to convince you the answer is: yes, we can!

By tapping into twitter's followship (who follows whom?), Perkpipe is able to measure each twitterer's familiarity to given keyword(s) supplied by online searchers, as the way Google ranks the importance of web pages or sites by looking at entire web structure.

Perkpipe Search vs Twitter Search

For many of you may have already been using twitter's search engine, you might start pondering why we start building another twitter search engine at Perkpipe. Are we re-inventing the wheel? Well, we hope your answer will be no after you've read this article. While you're digging into Perkpipe search, you may have found out the differences between Perkpipe Search and Twitter's own search.

As we know about twitter, it is all about real-time conversations and communications. The whole idea is based on freshness and convenience. This is one of reasons Twitter catches our eyeballs. But, I want to ask all twitterers three simple questions:

1.) How do you decide to follow people?

2.) How do you optimize your twitter stream and make the most out of it?

3.) And finally how do you pick up a trustworthy tweet and start reading it?

For the first two questions, some of you may only follow people they know in their real life (if you follow this category, then Facebook may suit you better!); some may follow their celebs only. However, most of you start following people you think they may excel at what you are interested in. When days go by, you may find out that your twitter steam is totally making non-sense to you! So you start unfollowing them and try to follow someone else...

The third question may be even tougher to answer. Even you've already been following right persons, you may still have to scan all of his/her tweets and pick a small portion of tweets that make sense to you.

This is the dilemma we are facing all the time! The dilemma exists because we lack an effective way to determine people's expertise. How do we solve this dilemma then? At Perkpipe, we try to measure twitterer's expertise by looking at his/her biography, followship (who follows whom? a.k.a social networks), and tweets all together. By the way, I have to claim that # of followers isn't a good indicator since follower count is easy to game.

We are still gathering twitter data via their APIs. Please do try play Perkpipe a little bit and give us your feedback.

What are you doing --> what's happening --> what are you searching for...