Twitter is great for real-time news and updates, but searching through your history for tweets on a specific topic — that’s much less efficient, even with hashtags. With more than 450 million tweets created every day, finding one from, say, 2007 may be harder (and more painful) than finding a piece of hay in a stack of needles.
Topsy, a San Francisco-based social-analytics company, aims to change that. Topsy is one of a small handful of companies that offer advanced Twitter search tools for the microblogging network’s entire stream, known as the Twitter “firehose.”