This article was published on August 26, 2010

Nsyght Turbo-Charges Twitter Lists


Nsyght Turbo-Charges Twitter Lists

When you follow a lot of people on Twitter, Lists can be a real help in sifting through what everyone is saying. However, what if you could make a list to track people and subjects across multiple social media services? That’s a feature that social search service Nsyght has just launched.

Nsyght lists allow you to add users or track text queries and filter the results by media type and the service it was posted to. So, if you want to set up a list just to see the images that everyone you work with is sharing, that’s simple. How about videos from The Next Web conference being shared on multiple services? Links being shared by your friends on Delicious and Facebook? Images everyone on Twitter  is sharing related to cats? They’re all easy to set up as saved search lists.

Nsyght currently supports Twitter, Last.fm, Delicious, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Digg and Myspace.

Lists can be private or public, making them useful both as a personal tool and for sharing with others. Another new feature rolled out today is ‘Mute’, allowing you to filter out a user’s tweets but still see their Flickr photos, for example. The service also has a new interface that’s pleasant to both look at and use. This is somethingwe feel previous versions of Nsyght lacked.

So, should you try Nsyght? Absolutely, but there are some caveats that stop us from recommending it wholeheartedly. Firstly, to get the most out of the social search features you need to be searching Nysght users who have added multiple services to their accounts. Simply searching public tweets won’t unearth those users’ Diggs for example. Also, as Nsyght lacks Twitter firehose access, it can’t always be relied upon to be up to the second. “”We dont really cache as such”, says founder Geoffrey McCaleb, “We’ve built our own search index but we are tracking over 12 million users – hence why things take a minute or 2 to catch up. Once you’re logged in, we do keep things rolling in real time”

We’ve followed social search service Nsyght for over two years and last time we looked it was most definitely heading in the right direction. It’s still heading that way, and we’ll certainly be using the List feature to create powerful searches when needed.

We’d love to see Nsyght team up with fellow UK company Tweetmeme’s new project DataSift. Datasift’s powerful search and filtering capabilities (and firehose access) could make Nsyght a real force to be reckoned with. Indeed, founder Geoffrey McCaleb tells us that it’s something he’s interested in looking at.

You can read more about Nsyght’s new features here and try it out by signing up here. Here’s Nsyght’s screencast demonstrating lists.

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