Twitter has been having its own set of problems lately. Even though the status blog set up by them helps the users in knowing what’s going on at their end, all they can do is wait for the services to be back to normal.

Twitter engineers have been trying to keep the high load off by turning off a few of the features. The API requests limit, which was 70 at one time has now been brought down to 30 20. This has rendered most of the apps making uses of the API such as twitterrific, hahlo and Twhirl useless.

Also, one of twitter’s most used features, the @replies tab is also disable many a times by the engineers to keep the load off, thus making it extremely difficult to track tweets which have been addressed to you. Interestingly, the @replies tab is only capable of tracking tweets which begin with @username. If a tweet has @username somewhere in the middle of the tweet, it goes unnoticed. A lot of users, who log in to twitter after a break have found it difficult and annoying to scan to pages of tweets to see if someone addressed them. It gets more annoying when twitter turns off the pagination feature.

What does one do in such a scenario ?

This is where sites like Summize and TweetScan are helpful. Let’s take a look at Summize.

Summize is a realtime search utility for twitter. You can search any keyword and it will fetch you the results instantly. There is option for advanced search which lets you search for words, hastags, people and even “near places”.

The results are displayed in a beautiful structure, showing you who tweeted what. You can then reply to that tweet, view the tweet on twitter. If you have searched for a @username, Summize will intelligently add a “View Conversation” option to view the entire conversation with that user. This is much better than twitter’s @replies tab since Summize also tracks keywords which are in the middle of the tweet.

If someone tweets your username after you have searched on Summize, Summize still tracks the updates in real time and updates you on the same page.

As more updates keep coming, the count is updated accordingly.

So, to track keywords or your @replies head to Summize and start tracking. You can bookmark this link in your browser too.
http://summize.com/search?q=%40username ( Replace username with your username )
http://summize.com/search?q=<query>

Next time you login to twitter, check that link to see if someone addressed you.

Alternatively, you can also use their API to keep a better track of things. They have an Atom feeds API, which you can add as an RSS feed in your favorite feed reader.

http://summize.com/search.atom?q=<query>

So how do you track tweets on twitter ? Leave a comment.