IntoNow users can “check in” to a particular episode once it’s been recognized, like one would check into a restaurant on Foursquare. The goal is to enable conversations around the watercooler and on social networks by helping users connect around what they’re watching and discover new things to watch.

It’s common knowledge that the only thing people love more than watching TV is talking about it, but none of the many “social TV” start-ups–GetGlue, Miso, Philo, Comcast’s Tunerfish etc.–has emerged as a clear leader. Unlike the competition, IntoNow isn’t trying to provide a platform for conversations, but rather to show what people are watching.

Still, it’s not clear people want to download an app to tell themselves and their friends what they’re already watching on television.

IntoNow can recognize both live television and five years of archived U.S. TV airings. It constantly analyzes satellite feeds and matches them to TV listings to have current data.

Adam Cahan, the CEO of IntoNow, says his company’s TV recognition technology–which it calls SoundPrint–is akin to a GPS, which takes the hassle out of figuring out exactly which restaurant you’re at and matching it to something like Foursquare’s database.

Cahan’s company was very recently spun out of Auditude, a company where Cahan was also CEO. IntoNow’s seven employees and its technology were all formerly part of Auditude, actually. That company, which just raised $11 million from investors including Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures, has shifted away from video identification to video advertising management. IntoNow has yet to raise its own funding, but Greylock and Redpoint already have equity in the start-up.

In addition to creating a feed of what episodes they’re watching, IntoNow users can share on Facebook and Twitter, look up programs on IMDb, add shows to their Netflix queues and purchase episodes on iTunes.

The name “IntoNow” comes from the expression “What are you into now?” IntoNow hopes other companies will build SoundPrint audio recognition into their own social TV products. SoundPrint has 2.6 million airings in its catalog, is constantly recording 130 channels and needs four to 12 seconds of audio to make a match.

While it’s only iOS for now, IntoNow and SoundPrint are in development for Android and Web-enabled televisions.

IntoNow eventually hopes to help content owners validate that their watchers are participating with live content, and help the TV industry measure advertising and viewership metrics without relying on a panel.

Even the service’s biggest fans concede that looking for something on Twitter, which can only return results in chronological order, is frustrating at best.

Twitter knows it, too. COO Dick Costolo told me yesterday that his company has a dedicated team working to improve search and that we should expect to see improvements throughout the year.

Meanwhile, other people are taking a crack at it. TweetUp, for instance, intends to lure eyeballs to its ads by promising search results that favor particularly “great” tweets and tweeters.

And here’s a tweak today from Google: A feature that lets searchers comb through the Twitter archives and pull results from a particular time period.

Google (GOOG), which has a short-term contract to syndicate Twitter’s stream, is only offering the feature for tweets going back to February 11 this year, but the company says it will eventually offer the service for all the tweets generated in Twitter’s four-year history (see image below; click to enlarge).

That’s not nearly enough to fix Twitter search, but it is cool. And probably useful in some situations.

The feature is rolling out now, but it may take a while to show up on your laptop. To see if it’s available, go to “options” on your search results page and pick “updates.” If you still don’t see anything, you can see a sample version here, though I was only able to get it to work with the Safari browser, for some reason. Go figure.

Alas, you’ve got no choice but to remember that last part. It has disappeared from the Web, apparently at the behest of Major League Baseball.

Stewart dissected the media hubhub about Obama’s pitch–and in particular Fox News’s analysis of it–on his July 15 show. But if you watch the archived version of that show at Viacom’s (VIA) “Daily Show” Web site, you’ll find that the bit has been cut out of his opening monologue. It once ran for two minutes and 43 seconds, but now the archive stops short at the 55-second mark.

And if you try to watch that episode on Hulu, the Web site owned by News Corp. (NWS), GE’s (GE) NBC and Disney (DIS), you’ll find that it’s gone altogether, replaced by a message blaming “rights issues” (click image to enlarge):

What happened? The story, via Viacom officials, is that pro baseball officials contacted them this week and told them to take down the Obama footage, which it owns.

The argument, I’m told, is that the MLB was fine with Stewart (and every other TV show in the country) using the clip under “fair use” terms–the footage itself was a news story, and Stewart was adding value via his commentary, etc. But it balked at the notion of the footage remaining in Viacom’s archives, and circulating on the Web, forever.

None of that makes any sense, of course: There’s no reason that Stewart’s use of the clip should be okay, but only for a limited time. And if Viacom wanted to spend time fighting MLB on this, it certainly could have.

But presumably, the company figures it wants to use its legal resources elsewhere–like fighting the never-ending copyright lawsuit it filed against Google (GOOG) and YouTube. Remember that one?

In any case, I’ve reached out to MLB to make sure I’m not missing anything here. And of course, you can still find all sorts of footage of the pitch, along with other anchors making fun of it, all over the Web. Like this one:

Here’s an edited version of the beginning of the July 15 episode of the “Daily Show.” Before you click on it, note the title of the clip, and it’s original running time.

I’m told that an edited version of the show will show up on Hulu again later tonight or on Thursday.