Twitter is a great place to inject yourself into a network of people with similar interests. Whether it be programming, or Soccer or just to entertain with Jokes about your sex tape being just you drinking copious amounts of coffee.

anyway...

A little known feature of the search on twitter is the Search Operators.

These are flags that can be used to filter your search with certain criteria.

Using these you can make a search link that contains all the tweets by all your favourite accounts.

Why would you want this?

Well, if you follow a lot of people, you lose some people's post through various things like the twitter algorithm or just simply time differences.

So what are Search Operators?

They're a little like SQL Operators. For example, you can use AND and OR in the search.

Lets start simple

Say you wanted to search for tweets from a specific user.

You'd be tempted to just search their '@'.

But.....

This will give you EVERYTHING.

You'll get tweets from them, that mention them and even posts from accounts that are similar.

The FROM Operator

In the search bar try

FROM:AndyHopwood2

Hit search and you will get everything from me.

• my tweets
• my replies

You might only care about actual tweets.

So how do we surpress replies?

Well theres 2 things to consider here. The first is the filter operator. This allows you to filter types of posts to return in your search. So...let's alter our search string

FROM:AndyHopwood2
filter:replies

If you search with this you'll notice you get nothing but my replies. that's not quite what we want.

To make the filter, filter things out of your search you can add a minus sign (-) just before the filter. so lets update our text.

FROM:AndyHopwood2 
-filter:replies

So now you'll have Nothing but my tweets. (Take a look. Like, retweet, share if you like 😁)

So how to make it pick up a few people?

That's part of the point of the post, right??

The OR Operator

If you combine our FROM operator with the OR operator you will get tweets from JUST those people.

To make it work, you have to keep repeating the FROM.

for example..

FROM:User1
OR FROM:User2
OR FROM:User3
-filer:replies

So lets get a few @'s together..

FROM:AndyHopwood2 
OR FROM:telmo 
OR FROM:EmmaBostian 
OR FROM:catalinmpit 
OR FROM:ASpittel 
OR FROM:shanselman 
OR FROM:DanijelaJs 
OR FROM:julielosseva 
OR FROM:kvlly 
OR FROM:dxnielvaughn 
OR FROM:sarah_edo 
-filter:replies

Copy this and put it in your search box. You'll see tweets from all these great programmers.

So how do we make this into a live feed?

If you're using normal twitter there's not a great way to do this. You can save your search and click on that when you want to see them.

Just be aware that there seems to be a character limit on saved searches. If it's too long, you just get an error.

The answer is......

TweetDeck

For the best experience you need to use this on a desktop. It's not a third party app. It's made by twitter and is in their domain.

It's a great tool. You basically have columns. Each column has the different types of content in them that are offered by twitter. Your timeline, messages, trending and notifications.

You can remove columns if you don't want one of them cluttering up your screen.

On the top left of your screen there is a search icon

Click this. The search box will appear. Paste/type your favourite people search string into there. When you hit enter, tweetdeck creates a new column with your search results in. This column is a live, updating feed of your search results!

So there you have it

You now have a way of doing this. What I'd like to see is a real way of doing this on mobile. Maybe even a mobile version of tweetdeck would be cool. Maybe I'll work on one myself. Watch this space 😊

Side note about tweetdeck

I thought I'd throw this in here because it's been really handy for me.

On tweetdeck you can schedule tweets for later in the day. So if you think of a tweet but know you get better impressions later on or even when you sleep. You can set a date and time to send the tweet. Tweetdeck doesn't even have to be still running on your desktop.

Go have fun!

**For anyone whose interested. The code block syntax I used was Ruby. Works pretty well for twitter search strings* 😊😂