Very Recent & Addictomatic: Finding What People Are Buzzing About Right Now!

Tom Churm pinged me about a new tool that he’s crafted, Very Recent, designed to pull back top results from "recency search engines," for lack of a better word. Blog search, news search, social news plus Twittering, all in one. It needs a lot of work, but I found it a pretty neat idea. And it reminded me of Addictomatic, which is also well worth a look.

Do a search at Very Recent, say, for iphone (the best phone evah!), and you get back results on a single page from:

• Twitter (Summize)
• Google Blog Search
• Technorati
• Flickr
• Yahoo News
• YouTube
• Digg

This is pretty cool. Many times I’ve been to some event and wondered what the buzz was about it. I’ll do a Google news search, then a blog search, then a Twitter search. I really need a single tool like Google News that will cluster or group the buzz on a topic for me.

Yes, I know there are various buzz metrics tools, such as Trackur. But unlike Trackur (unless I’ve missed it), I like how you can view results by source on Very Recent, rather than being all grouped in one. Plus, it’s a free tool.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t like a unified view. I’d like that, too, with perhaps some nice clustering and a much better interface presentation. But Tom’s just knocked it out, so I’ll hope that Very Recent improves.

Other nice options would be the ability to customize sources, perhaps add in FriendFeed if you want or a variety of other sites (like some social, news, and buzz sites from this great list).

That brings me to Addictomatic, which I wrote about last May. From what I said then:

From Dave Pell of Rollyo, it lets you pull back matching results from news search, blog search, and social media sharing sites.

What’s going on with Myanmar and the cyclone recovery? A myanmar search lets you see top results from major news sites, Google Blog Search, Technorati, YouTube, Digg, Flickr, and more on a single page. Nice! Don’t want a particular source? Just click the X in its box to make it disappear.

The NewsFix area also lets you see sources selected for particular topics. Thought 2.0 is kind of fun — a variety of A-List blogs all on a single page, showing their headlines.

So Addictomatic does what I wish Very Recent could do — lets you add sources, much nice to view. Looking again at it, I wish I would make the boxes stretch across an entire column plus make them show more than the top five headlines, if I wanted.

Finally, somewhat related, Alltop’s pages for what the popular Twitters and FriendFeed people are saying is interesting, too. I just wish those pages would say clearly at the top what’s included on them and why.