Sideline monitors Twitter, shows off Yahoo tools

It looks like just a developer's demo of the Yahoo User Interface Library, but Sideline is also a useful tool.

The people from the Yahoo Developer Network launched this little gem, an AIR app that lets you manage and display Twitter searches.

Sideline could be a useful Twitter monitoring service for marketers.

(Credit: screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

In addition to showing you which terms are trending on Twitter at the moment (more interesting and relevant than just watching the public stream go by), Sideline lets you create searches that get their own tabs in the interface.

Unlike Tweetdeck, though, which also lets you create searches, multiple Sideline searches can be grouped into bigger buckets, which show up as tabs. You can create a group of searches for all Twitter mentions of your company's various products in one tab, and, for the sake of argument, your competitors' products or issues in another.

Searches can be advanced or simple, with advanced queries almost (but not quite) getting Boolean options, as well as rough sentiment filtering.

A general-purpose Twitter client this isn't. You can't use it to follow the people in your Twitter network, and you can't post to Twitter from it. But it's a handy little tool, and a pretty sweet demo of Yahoo's UI Library. The code is open source. There's more about developing the app on the Yahoo User Interface Blog.

[kyle4beantown]

Due to Twitter?s character limit, users often abbreviate or use slang for the brand or product they are referring to. Making it easy to miss relevant mentions. For instance, if I was working for RIM and I wanted to track all mentions of the Blackberry Storm on Twitter, I would need to set up searches for ?Blackberry Storm,? ?BB Storm,? ?Berry Storm,? in addition to others - to make sure I wasn?t missing anything. Slide allows you to bundle all those search terms under a larger group name / tab. Therefore, I could set-up an all-encompassing ?BlackBerry Storm? tab, in addition to other tabs that track competing products (i.e. the iPhone) and industry terms (i.e. touchscreen).

[rafe]

Nicely put.

[DanHollings]

I like this app. It's very specific, or should I say focused in its use. I'll continue to play with it, but there's little doubt that PeopleBrowsr.com will remain my primary Twitter tool. Pretty much does what Sideline or Tweetdeck does, only better.

I do test (and use) many many Twitter apps. I've put together a nice training program on all this at Twitter Twenius http://twenius.com and I have 100 free Twitter tips at TwittinSecrets.com that add strategies to these tools.

I'll be adding Sideline to my mix. Thanks for the nice review.