Google Replay – See how a story broke on twitter

Ever wondered how news or a meme broke and spread on twitter? Now you can with Google Replay.

With the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, there’s a constant online conversation about breaking news, people and places — some famous and some local. Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted. We want to give you a way to search across this information and make it useful.

Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter.

Before I go any further. Many people I’ve spoken to have said they do not understand half the topics or concepts I blog about. Will try explain things talking about them a bit better from now on. I used the word meme in the opening sentence assuming you would know what it means. What exactly is a meme then? There are many definitions of the word meme but in this case it refers to a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one person to another by non-genetic means (as by imitation). Like the don’t touch me on my studio meme that hit South Africa a few days ago.

Now that you know what a meme is let’s get back to Google Replay. Continue reading to find out how exactly your can track a story through the twitter timeline with Google.

Where to find Google Replay? Click the Updates tab in the left sidebar of your Google search results. Now you can see all the twitter updates for a terms or phrase with a nice graph of the volume of updates. When you click a specific section of the graph you are able to see tweet from that exact point in time.

Could this be the first mention on twitter of those 6 words? Have you found anything older?