Tracking Keywords on Twitter

I had to piece this together from several sources (including some great hints from Mark Atwood), so I consider it blogworthy…

A few days ago I tweeted (posted an update on Twitter) that I was looking at OAuth. A few seconds later, Mark Atwood IM’d me: “Any questions about OAuth? I’m one of the spec authors”. Wow. How did that happen?

It turns out that you can now track keywords on Twitter. For some reason I thought you could only get this working via SMS, you can also do it on IM. Here’s how…

• You’ll need an IM client, if you haven’t already got one. I use Adium. Pidgin is also a fine choice.
• Get an AIM, GTalk or Jabber account, if you haven’t already.
• Follow the instructions to tie your IM account to your Twitter account.
• Now just IM track something to Twitter and you’ll get an IM whenever anyone uses that term (something can be more than one word). I’m tracking OpenSSO, my Twittername - metadaddy, and my real name.