The "tracking" feature in Twitter had become a staple of my communication. I used it to catch @colbypalmer, @itweet or @colbyworld replies, and to find out what people were saying about iTweet, my Twitter client, or my other projects. It's also a great way of monitoring your competition! It was recently disabled as a part of the Twitter downgrades, and I found that I was missing replies (checking the Replies tab for all three of my accounts is something I just can't keep up with) and feeling "out of the loop" as far as my product's relationship to its users.

Enter Tweetbeep.com: "Like Google Alerts for Twitter". This tool was created by Michael Jensen, @mdjensen on Twitter. Tweetbeep scans Twitter for terms or usernames (they use the excellent Summize for this) and emails you with your results.

It's not as real-time as the original tracking, but that's kind of a nice thing as you can opt to check for your updates hourly or daily, and you don't get a million text messages all day long. You can also add links to your search, which are gathered in real-time; Tweetbeep will even find links that have been masked via a TinyURL-type service, which is awesome since most links on Twitter are TinyURLs.

The part that I really like is that it's archivable, both in your email and aggregated in tweetbeep.com itself, which is a huge plus! Now I don't have to feel like I'm missing out by not following everybody on Twitter.

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