by Michelle Lentz

FINALLY!

How many times have you clicked that Find People link at the top of Twitter, only to be rebuffed by a “This is not active/working” type of message? I’ve clicked it repeatedly, only to be disappointed.

It’s now working. Officially called Twitter Name Search, you can now search for people by their actual names. It’s not the smartest of searches – for instance, I couldn’t search on anything except a name. It’s not picking up words in profiles. (For that, you can use Twellow.)

According to Evan Williams, the new search feature is smarter than it used to be:

… new name search is much faster, more relevant, and it even has a phonetic similarity algorithm which is basically fancy talk for spell check on names. For example, if you type in “Even Williamz” it will ask you, “Did you mean Evan Williams?”

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by Michelle Lentz

I first read about Twellow on Mashable yesterday. Once I started using it, I was hooked.

The one thing Twitter has always lacked is a reliable and useful People Search tool. Now there is Twellow. Twellow was developed to help you “cut through the clutter.”

Twellow is a service of WebProNews and at this writing, it had indexed over 331,000 Twitter users and filed those users into categories based on their Twitter profiles. A lot of folks, myself included, make sure to use useful key words in their Twitter profiles, and now there is a reason other than SEO. You can be indexed in Twellow!

You can’t be indexed if you have a Twitter account without an entry, no Twitter account, or a private/locked Twitter account. Therefore my professional account is available and my personal account is not. For me, this is perfect.

A search on my name or my Twitter user name produces, well, me. A search on my company name does not produce me, so obviously I need to make some adjustments.

Much more fun is a search on topics – “Blogging” brings up names like Anil Dash and Six Apart. You can also search within pre-defined categories, many of which you can find on the front page of the site, and from there you can drill-down into sub-categories.

The oddest thing I found about Twellow is its seemingly random updating of your latest Twitter post. My latest is listed as several days old, when I have in fact Twittered since then, whereas other folks are listed as “8 minutes ago.”

Regardless, Twellow is a much-needed search tool that just adds to the power of Twitter. Twellow is currently in Alpha, but is open for public use.

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