Topsy: The Twitter Search Engine

Thus far the trend we see in this “not so new” media involves building a community of sorts, allowing that community reach a critical mass, defining a way to organize that community’s information based on interest — and finally, building a business model around it.

Right now, a service called Topsy is allowing Twitter to move from the third step towards the fourth. Not that @hashtags were useless, but a search engine for any sort of information inside Twitter is something anyone can appreciate. Not only does it do hashtag and keyword searches, but it also acts like a “Twitterati” (a Technorati for Twitter) identifying Tweets that have your @username ID and how many times you were quoted by other users.