6 May 2010 - 10:48Social Mention: Social Media’s Crawler?

Social Mention is a social media search engine that directly monitors 80+ social media properties including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google and more.  If used the right way, it can be used as the world’s largest water cooler; online social networks.

At CreativeFeed, we were curious to see the effectiveness of this tool.  The convenience of aggregating user generated content into a single stream of information sounds great, but how well does it work?

As one blogger notes, “Those services are built for speed, not depth”.

A valid point, so let’s see.

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9:30AM

We find a scheduled release of information from an icon who Tweets excessively, P. Diddy!  Perfect.

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11:15AM

Sean John announcement is presumably made.

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11:19AM

Announcement has soaked for 4 minutes – let’s see what we can find

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11:28AM

Not entirely pleased with the results we found, we let the social media world and Google soak up Diddy’s announcement for 13 more minutes, and search using more specific terms.

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11:42AM

Nearly 30 minutes after the announcement, we search again using “P. Diddy Sean John Announcement”.

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Thoughts:

Sadly, the results were pretty inconclusive. Although Social Mention did find the result we wanted the most effectively and timely, we weren’t able to find any results remotely close to what we were trying to find just 13 minutes after the announcement – even when using more specific search terms!

As mentioned in our previous blog post, Could Facebook be the new Google?,  Google has difficulty indexing and delivering constant streaming data from online publishing, especially from microblogs and regular blogs. Our experiment showed this as we were unable to find any relative information regarding Diddy’s announcement.

Social Mention may never replace Google, but we’re interested in seeing how and where it can be useful.

Oh, and the information we were so fervently searching for?