The rapid-fire element of Twitter can absolutely obliterate any resemblance of a tidy conversation, as updates from a wide array of disparate users will interrupt the discussion between one or more people, especially if the conversation takes place over a little bit of time, rather than seeing second by second updates common on IRC or other chat rooms.Benjamin Golub, the developer behind the popular Google Reader shared links aggregator RSSMeme, debuted a solution called Tweet2Tweet today, which lets you search on any two Twitter user IDs, and pull up their discussion, even if the Tweets ended up only being one-way.
Tweet2Tweet's query interface
The data, powered by Summize, which is growing on me as a must-visit tool multiple times a day to query for specific terms I track, shows in a two-column format:
* Who initiated the conversation
* The full content of each Tweet.
* The timing of each Tweet, including a link.
* The in-line response from the second participant.
Now, instead of hitting the Twitter "Replies" tab to see what people have said in response to your notes, or hitting the "Conversation" tab in Summize to see just one exchange, you can now see all exchanges between two people, over the available period in Tweet2Tweet's database.
A few good examples:
Tweet2Tweet: @louisgray and @fourlittlebees
Tweet2Tweet: @loiclemeur and @centernetworks
A quick look at some of my conversations with @fourlittlebees
Having just launched today, Tweet2Tweet will undoubtedly see the same level of improvements that RSSMeme has enjoyed over the last several months. In my testing, I would occasionally see only one half of a conversation, or find empty results, especially when querying the most-active Twitter users. But it's a start, and a good one at that. Corvida of SheGeeks also looked at it earlier today and found it to be much like Facebook's Wall to Wall feature.