Tool for journalist: Snapbird, for searching Twitter

What is it: Search tool for Twitter's archive

How is it of use to journalists? If you've ever tried to track down an old tweet either in your own timeline or someone else's, you'll know it can be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Here's where Snapbird can make your life a lot easier. This free tool allows you to search by keyword for a particular tweet in your timeline, as well as favourites and mentions. You can also search these categories in other people's tweets, while searching for direct messages is of course limited to your own account only.

Snapbird will search your Twitter history back to when time began (or at least back to when you first signed up to Twitter).

The platform is similar to Topsy, only instead of being able to search by links, tweets, photos and videos, you can actually search specific people's timelines and more.

Snapbird does not, however, allow you to narrow a search by certain types of media.

As well as helping journalists find mentions of a particular topic by a certain person, the platform could also be used to track down an elusive tweet you spotted earlier but forgot to 'favourite' or email to yourself.

Prolific yet absent-minded tweeters could also find Snapbird useful to check if they have already posted something or not.

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