An easy to use but powerful web tool (it’s also free) named PolitickerUSA can save you a lot of time and effort informing you as to what members of congress are tweeting about right now.

In one location you can quickly access the non-stop real-time stream of tweets from Senators, Reps, President Obama, governors, and a few of the republican presidential candidates.

You can also filter the entire PolitickerUSA stream of tweets using a hashtag or word into the filter box. You do not have to click <enter>.

But Wait, There’s More

Here are a few other things you can do with PolitickerUSA.

1. Clicking any word or hashtag in a word cloud will run a search on Twitter for that hashatag or word.

2. Politician Trends allows you to quickly isolate and visualize the latest tweets from a specific politician.

3. A table of all politicians accessible using PolitickerUSA is available linking to their Twitter stream and providing their handle.

Kudos to the PolitickerUSA developer Brian for making the site available. You can read more about how he built the site here.

The other investor in this round is Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Mary Meeker joins the Waze board as a result.

Waze has successfully created a community of engaged drivers with its crowdsourced traffic data and turn-by-turn navigation. But the app is evolving into a local discovery tool as well:

Traditional GPS systems are built on a static, old world maps and points of interest, which never reflects real-time information about new businesses, pop-up shops, or live local events. The new social eco-system provides an osmosis of consumer-generated data from people driving, checking in, and reviewing locations in real-time. This layer of social location information is now available to drivers in a navigation setting. With community-curated data from Waze, Foursquare, & Yelp, drivers can now search for real-time events like the ongoing OccupyWallStreet protests as easily as they would find their local Walmart.

In addition to providing social-traffic data and local discovery Waze is collecting a great deal of “hotspot” and traffic pattern data that might be served up to retailers and others in the form of real-world analytics at some point.

Waze currently has meaningful usage in Israel, selected markets in Europe and Latin America, as well as the US. The Waze app’s “personality” and social experience differentiate it from the mass of GPS-navigation apps in the market.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Topsy Provides Twitter Archive Search

First, there’s a great alternative to Google Realtime Search: Topsy.

Indeed, the company has just put out a blog post reminding the world that it’s the only Twitter archive search service left standing.

Fair enough. That’s totally correct. The company expanded its coverage back August 2010, and my review below explains more about some of the features it offers:

• Topsy: Now Searching Tweets Back To May 2008

In fact, Topsy allowed you to go farther back than Google did. Google had promised that it would extend its index earlier than February 2010, but I don’t think that really happened.

Topsy tells me its index still goes back to May 2008, as I originally reported.

Bing Has The Firehose, But No Real Archive

Unlike Google, Topsy still has access to that “firehose” data from Twitter (and won’t reveal any more details than that). That’s why it’s still ticking along.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine also has firehose access. However, Bing Social Search doesn’t really let you go back more than a few days.

Bing’s tool is more designed, like Twitter’s own search engine, to allow you to search about what’s currently being said through Twitter and other update services at the moment. It’s not aimed at providing some type of historical search service.

Tweet Origin Tools

Some of those missing Google Realtime Search may be trying to track a popular topic on Twitter back to its origin. What The Trend may help here, and I’ll try to gather some others in the future. Here are also some past articles on this topic:

• The Origin Of #nickcleggsfault & Getting To More Relevant Tweets
• Who Started The “Dear Yahoo, I’ve Never Heard Anyone Say ‘Let’s Yahoo It’ Sincerely Google” Twitter Joke?

Where’s Twitter’s Own Archive?

At this point, you may be wondering why Twitter doesn’t make it possible to search through its own tweets for as far back as it has them. Yes, that does seem kind of crazy. However, it’s a conscious decision that Twitter has made.

Twitter has repeatedly told me, and others, that it wants to create search products that it thinks are more important to its users and that partners aren’t providing.

As Mike Abbott, Twitter’s vice president of engineering told me last year:

Google doing it [archive search] takes some of the pressure off. Where do we want to innovate in this world and drive unique set of experiences?

There’s no doubt that Twitter has build some great search tools. These articles have a bit more about that:

• The New Twitter & Search, An Illustrated Guide
• Move Over Time Sorting: Twitter Gets “Top Tweets” Search Results

And these articles talk more about the issue with archive searching and Twitter in general:

• Where Have All The Old Tweets Gone?
• All The Old Tweets Are Found: Google Launches Twitter Archive Search

As For The Library Of Congress…

By the way, you may recall that Twitter has been sending tweets to the US Library Of Congress. While that is an archive of sorts, it’s not one that anyone can search.

Also, just a little privacy reminder. While you can delete tweets, you’ve effectively only got six months from when you make a public tweet to prevent it from being stored with the Library Of Congress.

There’s a six month delay in the data they receive. After that, there’s no mechanism to prevent your tweets from later being discovered by Logan and Jessica when they stumble into the ruins of DC in the distant future.

What’s Left At Google?

Google still has access to any tweets that it finds through its regular crawling of the web. That means if you’re doing a regular Google search, you might find tweets that way. It just won’t be as focused, so you might find it helpful to use some of the search techniques covered here:

• Where Have All The Old Tweets Gone?

I’m checking to see if Google has any hidden commands that might help. One of the best is doing:

site:twitter.com/accountname

That type of search restricts a search to tweets from a particular person.

Expect Delayed Tweets At Google

However, in trying that today, you can already see problems that Google’s having now with tweets:

These are all tweets that I made yesterday. Nothing I tweeted this morning (I’ve done at least four tweets) is showing up. Worse, you can’t even tell what these tweets are about, as there’s been no title automatically created for them.

When I went looking for one particular fresh tweet of mine, I couldn’t find it, though oddly, I did get shown someone retweeting it:

Annoyingly, I’ve also found some cases where aggregators show up when my own tweet doesn’t:

That leads over to the Inagist site, which I never heard of before, and which apparently embeds the photo I uploaded through Twitter to yfrog. Or something. It kind of makes my head hurt.

All I know is that I don’t find my tweet, which is a problem for Google, but also for Twitter. But let’s stick with the Google problems, for now.

Twitter, Google & News Shares

Google also uses Twitter data in a variety of other ways. One way had been to show the number of shares of news articles or updates that people were doing related to a news topic. Some examples of these are in our article from last October:

• In The Wake Of Bing & Facebook, Google Web Search Tests Getting More Social

Looking today, I see less of this. But occasionally, these do appear:

If you try to drill in, you get an error:

Twitter, Google & Social Search

Google also taps into Twitter for its Google Social Search service, both to help create connections and to help surface content that is being shared on Twitter by those in your network. Our story from February covers this more with some examples:

• Google’s Search Results Get More Social; Twitter As The New Facebook “Like”

Looking today, I can still see this working, where Google is clearly seeing things that are shared via Twitter through its ordinary crawling.

Look at the last line below, and you can see how Google flags this story as being shared on Twitter:

But interestingly, I also noticed something new today:

There, you can see how when I hover over “Matt Cutts” in the “shared this” area, I’m told I’m connected to him through the new Google+ social network.

While Google+ has mainly seemed a way for Google to collect data it feared being locked up within the walls of Facebook (see Steven Levy’s excellent Wired piece for Google effectively confirming this), it suddenly is providing a useful backup for Twitter, too.

For now, that backup mainly seems to be helping in forming social connections. But in the future, it could be that Google Realtime Search might return powered by posts from Google Plus.

Loss Of Link Juice

Finally, Google has used the sharing on Twitter as a form of ranking signal to help determine the quality of content it lists. This was a bigger impact for results in Google Realtime Search, but it was also used in other ways. Our story below has more on this:

• What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?

Over at SEOmoz, they’ve been trying to test what if the loss of the firehose may have impacted SEO efforts. I think the results are fairly inconclusive, but you may want to check them out.

One big change is that tweeted links are back to being nofollow — IE, not passing link credit.

As my What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count? article explains, in the Twitter firehose, links didn’t have nofollow attached. That’s a lot of link juice that’s just evaporated. It’s unclear what the impact will be for publishers and Google alike, yet.

Says Google…

I talked with Google’s Amit Singhal — who oversees all of Google’s search products — about the impact on the Twitter firehose being closed. He said that Google won’t catch tweets as quickly as in the past, though he said the delay would be of one of shifting from seconds to minutes. My testing above suggests it’ll be much longer than that, in some cases.

Singhal also said that Google probably won’t have as comprehensive collection of tweets as it did in the past. While technically, Google has the capacity to crawl Twitter’s site and gather up all the tweets when they happen, he figured that would probably crash Twitter. Search engines generally try to be “polite” when crawling and not gather data so quickly as to impact a site’s human users.

In terms of social search, Singhal wasn’t certain the impact that the Twitter change might have on things yet. But he did say that Google was already having to calculate the number of shares, or tweets, that a particular page on the web may have gained on its own. That means Google can continue to create those counts, though it may take longer for it to understand the full counts and how quickly something is being shared.

I also asked about the loss of Google Realtime Search. It launched as part of a big Google press event, with some realtime results injected directly into the main results. There was a lot of fanfare over how important and useful this was. With it gone, isn’t Google losing something?

“Ideally, we would still have a partnership,” Singhal said. “But we’ve decided in all, we’re OK with the current state of things.”

Singhal also clarified that the firehose was turned off on Twitter’s side, as a result of the agreement not being renewed. Google felt that Google Realtime Search had to close entirely, because it depended so heavily on Twitter content, even though other realtime content was also part of it.

Do People Really Miss Google Realtime Search?

Google might be right about the “getting along OK” part. Yes, I miss Google Realtime Seach. Google tells me they’ve also had journalists begging for it to return and had to explain they can’t do anything without an agreement. Nicholas Carr penned a piece about having the “shakes” from this sudden realtime search withdrawal.

But in general, practically no one seems to be complaining. There was no barrage of “what’s up” tweets that came out when the service suddenly closed. In contrast, Google’s change of its navigation bar to black seems to have generated much more discussion.

My news editor Barry Schwartz, who constantly scans Google’s own forums and search forums across the web for his own Search Engine Roundtable site, tells me that he figures complains about realtime search being gone are only about 5% of those about the new navigation bar — if that.

It reminds me of when Google couldn’t reach a deal with the Associated Press last year. For about a month, AP content disappeared from Google News. Virtually no one noticed.

Still, a bigger test will come with breaking news events, I’d say. When actress Brittany Murphy died, it was the first big test of how realtime results could improve Google’s relevancy, and they very much did. Google seems to have lost something useful, I’d say.

It’s Also Twitter’s Problem

Of course, Twitter’s missing something, too. As I explained above, it’s not particularly nice to search for your own tweet and not be able to find it on Google, if that’s where you choose to look. Plenty will be looking there, I’d say, because Twitter has effectively trained them to do that. Nor has Twitter, so far, tweeted or posted anything about what people should do now if they want historical tweets.

More important, Google remains a powerful traffic driver. Now, instead of people finding tweets and ending up back at Twitter, they may show up at official aggregators or unofficial scrapers. That doesn’t seem to help Twitter’s bottom line, nor does it seem a good user experience.

Twitter, by the way, isn’t saying more than what I initially reported –

Since October 2009, Twitter has provided Google with the stream of public tweets for incorporation into their real-time search product and other uses. That agreement has now expired. We continue to provide this type of access to Microsoft, Yahoo!, NTT Docomo, Yahoo! Japan and dozens of other smaller developers. And, we work with Google in many other ways.

What Happened?

No one’s saying why the agreement was allowed to expire. While it was signed at the same time that Microsoft’s was, the Microsoft agreement is continuing. I get the impression this wasn’t because it was renewed but rather that the Microsoft deal hasn’t expired yet.

Microsoft told me, about about the deal:

We won’t disclose the terms of the deal, but it’s a long term arrangement that we’re pleased with, and plan to keep in place as long as it’s delivering benefit for people who use Bing.

I got a tip after the news broke that perhaps sheds more light. I was told that the rumor is, according to several CEOs who run search start-ups, that Google was negotiating to renew the agreement for two years at $35 million per year, or $70 million in total.

Now that’s not much for Google. But it’s likely a huge amount for Google given that the company pretty much doesn’t pay to license anything.

The last deal with Twitter, rumored to be for $15 million, was pretty unprecedented. Carrying Twitter’s ads on Google, with Twitter’s branding, definitely was. Twitter Promoted Tweets Come To Google explains more about this.

So maybe it wasn’t about the money as much as other issues. That leads to something else the tipster told me: that Microsoft is apparently not that happy with its Twitter relationship, not seeing the value in paying for it when smaller search startups get firehose access for free, and that it might just drop Twitter and license the data out from a third party.

Caveat time. I’ve not had a tip from this person before, so I can’t vouch for it with a history of this person always being right. It could, for all I know, be entirely off the mark. If anyone knows better and wants to share more, get in contact. I’d love to hear.

I did go back to Google, Microsoft and Twitter with this information. Twitter just reiterated what it said before. Google did the same. Microsoft gave me the statement above about its deal generally and said it doesn’t comment on rumor and speculation.

Actually, Microsoft does comment on rumor and speculation, as do Google and Twitter, whenever they decide its in their interests to do so.

I also asked Microsoft if there were any plans to create a comprehensive Twitter archive search and was told:

We’re not discussing future product plans, but we don’t have any immediate plans to create a deeper archive.

That’s all I know, at this point. If you’re looking for those older tweets, definitely check out Topsy. As for Twitter and Google, I guess it’s stay tuned.

Links Mentioned In The Article

• As Deal With Twitter Expires, Google Realtime Search Goes Offline
• Google Launches Real Time Search Results
• Brittany Murphy’s Death & Google’s Real Time Search Results
• Twitter Promoted Tweets Come To Google
• Where Have All The Old Tweets Gone?
• All The Old Tweets Are Found: Google Launches Twitter Archive Search
• Topsy: Now Searching Tweets Back To May 2008
• Bing Launches Social Search Features
• The New Twitter & Search, An Illustrated Guide
• Move Over Time Sorting: Twitter Gets “Top Tweets” Search Results
• An Illustrated Guide To Searching For Shared, Tweeted & “Realtime” Images
• The Origin Of #nickcleggsfault & Getting To More Relevant Tweets
• Who Started The “Dear Yahoo, I’ve Never Heard Anyone Say ‘Let’s Yahoo It’ Sincerely Google” Twitter Joke?
• Where’s AP In Google News? Apparently In Limbo, As Contract Running Out
• Google & AP Extend Long-Term Content Deal
• Google’s Search Results Get More Social; Twitter As The New Facebook “Like”
• Google’s Facebook Competitor, The Google+ Social Network, Finally Arrives
• What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count?
• The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors

A message on Collecta’s home page tells visitors, “The Collecta story will be updated shortly … you caught us in transition.” ReadWriteWeb reported earlier that Collecta plans to make its software open source and is already working with agencies such as the United Nations that could potentially use the software to help with crisis relief projects.

Collecta launched about two years ago when real-time search was a hot topic. It offered a number of advanced search options and claimed to have information available to users less than a second after it appeared on Twitter, Flickr, blogs and other sources.

In January of this year, Collecta effectively left the real-time search space and said it would take a step back to assess its future. At that time, Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell told us that the real-time search market didn’t develop in the way the company had hoped.

Erstwhile Collecta competitors Crowdeye and OneRiot have also gotten out of the pure real-time search space.

I’ve used realtime search tools often, in order to see if people are tweeting and sharing images from news events, such as when the tsunami hit Crescent City. At times, they can provide a faster way to see images before news outlets themselves.

Nachofoto

Nachofoto launched in April 2010 but closed a few months ago to rework the site. Now it’s back and is completely focused on providing fresh images from across the web. It aims to be the primary destination for anyone seeking photos being shared through realtime services, be that via Twitter, blog posts or as part of new web pages.

The site’s home page offers a number of suggested queries that are supposed to reflect news topics that also have many images being shared:

“Aflac Duck” is among the Hot Topics that are trending? Really? Yes. If you drill in by clicking on that link, you get images plus a timeline that shows a recent spike:

Click on the tall bar at the end, and you can drill in more:

Selecting an actual photo brings you to the site with the image –  in the case of CBS, a story about how comedian Gilbert Gottfried, the voice of Aflac’s duck, was fired after making jokes about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Oddly, the picture in the story doesn’t match the picture the Nachofoto showed — but there is a matching photo that is hosted on CBS, so it might have been changed after the initial publication.

Searching For Realtime Images With Nachofoto

How well does Nachofoto work if you’re after a particular image? I haven’t done any large scale testing, but I still like the options that Topsy offers better. More on that further in the story. First, let’s do search at Nachofoto.

While Japan is in the news right now, the image stream is pretty polluted by pictures people are taking of TV images, pictures shared from past earthquakes and more. There are ways to address this, but I thought a search for Bahrain might be more instructive, where protests are happening, resulting in a government crackdown.

With Nachofoto, I can do search for bahrain and get back a timeline view:

What I immediately dislike is that most of the images tend to be from media sources, while I personally often want to use realtime image search to see what citizen journalists are recording. Ideally, I’d like an option to restrict my search to one of the main realtime photo sharing sites or by date range.

Searching At Topsy

I love how Topsy makes realtime image searching easy. From the Topsy photos area, just enter your search, in this case, for bahrain:

The arrows show how you can toggle to see the most recent results first or by other time ranges, such as over the past hour. I’ve found having these time options incredibly useful, when I’m seeking the most recent images.

The images also don’t all seem to be from media outlets. However, it can still be difficult to tell if images are coming directly from those tweeting them. I usually try to hunt back to the originating Twitter account and see if there’s a location being associated with someone’s tweets or other clues, such as if they’ve tweeted additional photos, to better tell.

Using Google Realtime Search

Over at Google, the company’s Google Realtime Search service allows you search through recently shared material and narrow down to those containing images:

You just have to make sure you click on the “Updates with images” option as I’ve pointed to in the screenshot above.

Unfortunately, the display of images isn’t as nice or as compact with Topsy, and using the “Timeline” feature in the top right corner isn’t as easy, to me, as Topsy’s hour / day / week / month buttons.

Searching By Location With Google

Google, however, has a great trick that neither Nachofoto or Topsy can do — it can find pictures based on location. Imagine you want pictures about Bahrain from people actually in Bahrain. This is where search by location can help:

Over on the left, I’ve entered “Bahrain” as a location. That causes Google to only show tweets that come from Bahrain and also which have images.

Searching By Location With Twitter

There are two downsides to searching by location for images at Google. First, some people might be sharing images from Bahrain but not reporting a location with those images. If you filter by location, you won’t see any of those non-location tagged images. There’s no easy solution to that.

The second issue is that some might be sharing images from Bahrain but not using that word (or that word in English). Google Realtime Search doesn’t allow you to do a “blank” search for anything by location. Twitter Search, however, does. Using its advanced search page, you can enter a location:

Then you get back tweets that come only from Bahrain:

Sadly, there’s no option to narrow these tweets down to those containing images. Instead, you have to search for words that are associated with images. For example, consider this:

In the search above, I’ve told Twitter to search for tweets that are within 15 miles of Bahrain (it probably uses a radius out of the center of the country for this) and which have the word “twitpic” in them — which is part of the URL used by the popular Twitpic sharing service.

Notice especially the third tweet. It says nothing about “Bahrain” in it — but by using location plus “twitpic,” I was able to turn it up.

Easier Picture Previewing On Twitter

Unfortunately, Twitter Search doesn’t make it easy to see the images, compared to the way that searching on Twitter itself does. To better understand the difference between searching using Twitter Search versus Twitter.com, see my previous post: The New Twitter & Search, An Illustrated Guide.

One solution is to do a search on Twitter Search, such as I did above, and then copy and paste the search terms into Twitter, like this:

In the example above, I pasted this:

near:bahrain within:15mi twitpic

Into the search box at Twitter.com. When the results appeared, I could then easily click on them and make the picture appear on the right.

Ideally, Twitter would make Twitter Search work the same way. Until then — or if it never happens — you can copy-and-paste or learn some of the advanced search commands for Twitter Search and use them directly at Twitter.com.

Other Real-Time Image Search Engines

Beyond the services above, there are a few other real-time image search engines you might want to check out.

Twitcaps: Search across multiple sharing services using keywords, over the past day. You can filter by language or by a particular service. Narrowing by location is offered by hard to use. You can’t do a “blank” search by location.

PicFog: Promises to let you search by keyword and narrow by location across various sharing services, but its inability to find anything for a search on “bahrain” made me sadly doubt it’s that helpful in general.

Roooby: Another search engine that lets you search across several photo sharing sites. There’s no way to narrow by location.

Photo Sharing Sites

You can, of course, try searching at some of the popular photo sharing sites used by those on Twitter. Below are some of the more popular ones and the searching options they offer.

I’ve listed them in the order I see them suggested in both the Twitter iPhone and iPad apps, which is one indication of how popular they are (those at the top are likely used more). I also included Instagram at the end, as I know it’s another popular sharing tool.

TwitPic: Search by keyword, sort results by most recent, popular or “mixed.”

yFrog: Search by keyword, results sorted by date, by default. You can also sort by most popular and narrow to popularity over the past hour, day or month.

Plixi: Search by keyword, results sorted by date, by default. There’s an option to see “Most Viewed” pictures, and this seems to be most viewed over the past week.

Mobypicture: Search by keyword, plus through advanced search, the ability to do a “blank” search by country or location, with sorting by date, relevance or views. A pretty impressive range of options.

Twitgoo: Search by keyword, get results sorted apparently by most recent first.

Posterous: If it offers search, this isn’t available for non-logged in users.

img.ly: It appears to offer no search feature.

Instagram: It appears to offer no search feature. You can’t even browse pictures from the home page. Oddly makes me feel bad for even trying to view it on the web. Maybe that big iTunes App Store button gives me that “get off my lawn” feeling.

Where’s Flickr? While it’s a great photo sharing site, I haven’t personally found or seen that it has gained much traction as a place where people try to share images within seconds after taking them.

All the best with your real-time image searching!

The new video search functions similarly to Topsy’s other search tools — web (links), tweets and photos. Results appear to be ranked based on several factors, including how often, how recent, and who shares the video on Twitter. The left column offers a number of filtering and sorting options.

Those search results are pretty good; I found a few Japan-related videos that I hadn’t seen yet despite having Twitter open all day the past two days.

Topsy isn’t the first real-time video search engine around. TweetMeme continues to offer video search, and OneRiot used to offer it, too. That was before OneRiot shut down its entire search engine and passed its search partners to … Topsy. Google doesn’t (yet) offer a video filter on its Realtime search, just one for images.

But, with many real-time search engines struggling and/or shutting down altogether (i.e., Collecta, CrowdEye, and others), Topsy may eventually become the default and even the last real-time search engine standing.

He was candid, however, that the market he and his team anticipated never materialized — or at least not in the way they had hoped. “We had hoped to find ourselves in the mainstream of activity,” said Campbell. Collecta’s ambition was to be both a destination and power the real-time web; and the company built a substantial infrastructure to do so.

Yet one could argue that the major search engines’ incorporation of Twitter’s feed in particular stole much of the thunder of specialized search engines such as Collecta, Topsy, Crowdeye and OneRiot. They’ve all had to shift because of Google and Bing’s “appropriation” of real-time search.

It’s also my sense that consumers never completely “knew how to relate” to real-time content, despite it’s demand in selected contexts: friend feeds, sports, news, politics, financial information. In other words, there wasn’t enough to lure consumers to these sites, especially after they could get some version of it from their familiar search engines.

Maybe it was a problem of packaging and marketing more than anything having to do with the content itself. Indeed, Campbell and I discussed how the “real-time web” and the news/activity feed are here to stay.

Campbell told me he has a number of potential product ideas and directions but didn’t want to disclose them for obvious reasons. Reflecting on Collecta’s impact, he added that he felt Collecta’s UI and streaming results became a model for others including Twitter. “We were a catalyst in the industry,” he asserts.

Campbell observed that the “market has changed radically” in the two years since Collecta launched. However he says he still believes in the technology and the approach that Collecta developed.

He wouldn’t put a time frame on when a new product might emerge but was confident that one would. Campbell told me the team is intact and that Collecta has money in the bank and a very committed and supportive board.

Related posts:

• OneRiot Shutters Real-Time Search Engine, Focuses On Ad Network
• Topsy Launches Brand-Friendly Twitter Widgets
• Collecta Launches Mobile Version Of Real-Time Search Engine
• Collecta And CrowdEye Join The “Real Time” Search Club
• Collecta Adds Social Sharing, Other Features

Topsy’s module-maker is similar to what Twitter offers (and others), but with a couple notable differences that businesses should appreciate:

• Tweets can be filtered by influence (see the middle check box in the image above; see Topsy’s website to read how it determines influence)
• Tweets are profanity-free
• Content can be filtered to only include links that point to the brand’s domain
• The widgets can be monetized

The filtering I describe is possible because Topsy’s modules pull content from its own index of tweets — an index that Topsy says is the biggest available — and not from the raw “firehose” feed of tweets.

In my brief time playing with the module maker, I noticed one minor drawback to this: The tweets that display are not up-to-the-minute. The most recent tweets I saw were about a half-hour old. I’m guessing that businesses and publishers will probably look on that as a fair trade-off for having a cleaner, brand-friendly Twitter feed to display on their sites.

Today, Topsy has announced that it’s taking on OneRiot’s former real-time search partners via the Topsy API, which already powers real-time search on many websites and applications. As part of the partnership, Topsy is also monetizing its search platform via OneRiot’s ad network.

“We are honored that OneRiot is partnering with Topsy to transition their organic real-time search partners to our team,” says Topsy CEO Vipul Ved Prakash. “OneRiot ads, coupled with the largest indexed set of Twitter data on the planet from Topsy, let publishers keep their audience engaged while they monetize in a safe way through relevant, fresh content from across the social web.”

“Realtime search is still very important to us,” writes OneRiot CEO Tobias Peggs. But he says the company will focus solely on its ad network, which already syndicates “millions” of paid search ads every day.

Our advertising platform has taken off like a rocket – both in terms of network growth and the number of advertisers who are seeking to engage with the social influencers across that network. Going forward, we’ll be focusing all our energy on this side of the business. It’s the right decision. Focusing means we’ll move faster and deliver more in this one area.

OneRiot has partnerships with social sharing sites like TwitVid and TwitGoo, Twitter apps such as Ubertwitter and Echofon, other real-time sites like Topsy and Kosmix, as well as some individual publishers, too.