How to filter twitter feed by keyword?

September 17, 2010 10:35 AM

Help me filter my foodtruck twitter feed! I want to get only tweets referencing my street (so I can only see the foodtrucks who will be near me that day) without having to read 8000 other tweets. Iphone or web based please. Bonus points for easy -- I'm a twitter novice.

The food trucks each make about 10-20 tweets a day, each one saying either "I'm going to be on Sawtelle/Olympic (bluesky's neighborhood) for lunch today, yay!", "I'm going to be in (some other neighborhood) for lunch today, yay!" or "@joeschmoe, you rock too dude!" I'd like to see only tweets in the first category.

I think we need to find a way to show tweets from the foodtrucks I follow containing the words "sawtelle" or "olympic". Help? My google-fu is failing me.

Thanks in advance mefites!!!

posted by bluesky78987 to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Yahoo Pipes will do the filtering via an RSS feed (and spit it back out to RSS), but there will be a little bit of a lag. Do you need real-time results or pushing to your phone?
posted by chrisamiller at 11:02 AM on September 17, 2010

use http://search.twitter.com/

and enter something along these lines in the search field:

lunch Sawtelle OR Olympic from:foodtruck

in the example I've used above breaks down like this:

The word "lunch" must appear in the results.
Either of the words "Sawtelle" or "Olympic" need to be in the results.
And the only posts searched are from the user @"foodtruck"

Quick and dirty, but it should help you filter down the number of post you have to check.
posted by elroyel1327 at 11:08 AM on September 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

I recently heard of TweetAgora. It appears to have some great filtering features that may meet your needs, but I have yet to take it for a spin myself.
posted by rickfu at 12:19 PM on September 17, 2010

There's a Map for that

Several actually. That's just the first one I found.
posted by willnot at 1:53 PM on September 17, 2010

I use Seesmic Web for exactly this purpose: first I created a [self-link]Twitter list of LA food trucks (making a List means I can track all the LA food trucks' tweets without Following them so that their mostly useless tweets clog up my main stream).

Then, with Seesmic Web, you can leave a mini-window open for a specific list , and you can filter tweets in that list. In my case, I only filter for tweets containing the word "Hollywood."

Note: Seesmic lets you log in using Twitter but I think you have to create an actual Seesmic account to save the filter. I found this feature by accident but it's been a major time-saver!
posted by estherbester at 7:50 PM on September 17, 2010 [1 favorite]