Pushed live late last night, PostPost‘s relaunch is all about enhancing its core aspect. With a big search box spread across the page and only one way to login, there’s no escaping what PostPost is for: searching Twitter.
Frustrated with Twitter’s terrible search? Want to know what the people you follow are sharing about a certain topic? Sad about the fleeting nature of tweets, that get pushed down to be forgotten and never found again? With PostPost, finding those good tweets will never be a problem for you again. Built by Waltham-based agency Boathouse, PostPost is the social search engine for what’s shared by the people you follow on Twitter.
After logging in with your Twitter account, the first thing you’ll notice are two new filter buttons next to the search bar that hint at the biggest updates. PostPost searches now not only pull from the 140 characters of a tweet shared by the people you follow, they also go beyond to search the text behind any links, news articles, or photos being shared.
What was the first thing I searched for? Photos from SXSW, of course. I entered “#SXSW” into the search box and selected the photos filter. Voila — news and silly tweets were excluded, and only a stream of photos surfaced from the people I follow on Twitter who are down in Texas enjoying SXSW (see screen shot below).
“We’re totally committed to search. That might not seem like a big change, but it is,” explained Brad Noble, who has led the PostPost project since it was just an idea at Boathouse. “We eliminated the functionality that allowed a user to ‘create a postpost’—a manually curated list that users would find, and then pull out of, our search results. Instead of postposts, we’re now focused on making search results super-engaging, and easy to share.”
When the product soft launched into open beta the end of November, it included RSS feeds and Flickr photos as well as Tweets, allowing you to create more personalized streams of content called ‘postposts.’ “When we were considering the list of improvements to PostPost, we decided to focus entirely on our strengths and kill everything else,” explained Noble. “Because Twitter is the network we know best, we’re saying goodbye to Flickr and RSS for now.”
On your PostPost homepage you’ll notice a big number displaying the number of tweets that will be searched to bring results back to the very top. Perhaps you’re curious what your followers are sharing about the crisis in Japan, the new Justin Bieber movie, or why Boston Common is all fenced off by Park St. – whatever it is, PostPost will search that number of tweets and pull the relevant ones back to the top. Your main PostPost page also features saved searches for quick access to things you more regularly want to know.
Updates to the PostPost search results pages are mostly in its redesign. The major addition is that you can now filter by media type (that is, just links, just photos or all tweets). And you also still have the ability to filter results by particular Twitter handles. This comes in handy when you want to know what just a select few people (thought leaders, your closest friends, etc.) have shared on a popular topic.
Along with these product updates and redesign comes an additional component that speaks to PostPost’s future: an API.
“We made a ton of technical changes that make for even faster and more relevant search results. What’s important is that these improvements enable not only a better experience on the site, but also a powerful and flexible API,” shared Noble. “As we’ve discussed before, companies can use our API to bring the reviews and commentary that live on Twitter to the users of their sites and products.” If you are a site or product owner, you can learn more about the PostPost API and how it can help bring the power of word-of-mouth to your property by contacting them.
Overall, the new PostPost look and focus on search will make more it more of a go to resource – especially for me. Read more details about the PostPost story from our interview with them the end of November, and be sure to check out their video demo below:
