My new favorite twitter command: track

On my flight up to NYC last night I was catching up on a few past newsgang lives. On one of the shows from last week, Steve gets into why he likes using Gtalk as his twitter client and specifically about the ‘track’ command. I know this falls under the category of RTFM , but I had never heard of the ‘track’ command. I use the @ all the time for replies (since it is so easy in Twhirl) and I sometimes use ‘d’ for direct messages. I have avoided using # (hash tags) since I don’t think its all that valuable, a belief confirmed by the existence of track. This really is the ultimate discovery tool for finding people to follow and making sure that you are keeping up on the topics in the twiver you are most interested in. I’m reminded of when I found out about technorati to track blog post terms.
I think this may also be useful in the case that Doc Searls mentioned a few months back in looking for an integration between Dopplr and Twitter. When I was in Chicago last week, I could have used ‘track Chicago’, ‘track field museum’, ‘track museum of science and indsutry’ and been able to connect with other tweople that were in the area.
This needs more exploration.