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Searching Twitter while tweeting as a shared second brain

7 tweets · December 2019 · 18 likes · 1 retweets · read on Twitter

I have a habit now of searching before/while I tweet, to see what relevant gems from the past I can pull in. This was a really delightful instance: I had an idea, and wanted to call it "reverse lobbying". Turns out someone already open-sourced the term 6.5y ago!

Usually when I do this I tick the "People you follow" box because the terms are common enough ("intimacy", "meditation", "death", "nihilism" etc) that I want to get stuff that still feels like it's part of the same conversation that I'm in, not randos.

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

wanna borrow a friend's thought and bring it to a couple of other friends' conversations (a cool thing you can do on twitter that you can't quite do anywhere else) @Malcolm_Ocean u were talking about what is a blog vs a book, @Conaw you were QT-ing my thoughts abt threads –

quoting @kevinakwok: A very good proxy for how enjoyably walkable a city is, is the orange zones in google maps Also makes it easy to compare cities, here's Paris vs SF at same zoom. Insane how much more walkable Paris is--and how distributed. https://t.co/h2wQnOJcOo

I assume this habit emerged because I was searching for specific tweets I'd seen before to quote, and started seeing other tweets that were even better, prompting me to do a search even if I didn't know what I'd find. That got me both of these! 👆🙃👇

Rahul Ramchandani 🤖 @Rahul_Ramc ·

56/ "What makes streams ideal contexts for open-ended innovation through tinkering is that they constantly present unrelated people, ideas and resources in unexpected juxtapositions." Also known as context collapse. This is what makes twitter so good.

First one was `twitter conversation` and second was `twitter unexpected`. With second search I was actually looking for this one 👇, which I eventually found via searching `from:conaw reward` & scrolling his zettelkasten thread until I found it.

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

Twitter is the fucking coolest note-taking app. It’s like Evernote with a slot machine attached. Sometimes you get incredible feedback or a response that gives you 10x more value than you expected, and sometimes you get people discussing your genitalia! So exciting

[video]

Memory is wack. Twitter is a weird shared second-brain. (Found this guy by searching `from:malcolm_ocean searching`)

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

@visakanv @QiaochuYuan @yhazony Oh man and I wanted to find Qiaochu's tweet again and this time I found it by searching "from:malcolm_ocean qiaochuyuan searching" to find THIS tweet. Wat.

Want to up your twitter search game? Custom search commands for yourself and the people you most want to quote. Click through for thread:

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

@Conaw @gmws82 @visakanv @ultimape @GRITCULT @KevinSimler @vgr @context_ing I do this with a custom Chrome (Brave actually) search engine. - tw searches twitter - twm searches twitter with from:malcolm_ocean pre-typed - twv searches twitter with from:visakanv (just added that last one but have been meaning to for awhile)

Also lobby to @Twitter & @jack to realize that QTs are a killer feature & • give it its own notification tab • # & button on each tweet to see where quoted • improve composer for QT-embed • etc

Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv ·

Nice Here’s my #1 rec for @twitter: realize that quote tweets are a killer feature of your product. Add it as a separate part of notifications besides All and Mentions. And separate it from RTs. Ie make it “likes, RTs, QTs”. Sounds radical? It’ll push this game into hyperdrive

quoting @patrickc: A former Stripe user, who now works here, has written some remarkably good documents about how we should improve various parts of Stripe.