I have just started playing around with Twitter, there has been a lot of hype in the press about this site, so I thought I would see what all the fuss is about. I have to admit that the reason why I am so late joining Twitter is that I was a big sceptic – why should I use Twitter when I already have LinkedIn and Facebook accounts? My initial impressions of Twitter are very positive, I have already tracked down some of the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs I follow, and I have found it both useful and amusing following their Tweets. Why is Twitter useful?
The value of ‘Real Time’….
What makes Google and other search engines so valuable is that they capture peoples intentions – what they are looking for and what they want to learn about etc. They don’t capture what people are doing or what they are thinking about. For thoughts and events that are happening right now, searching Twitter increasingly brings up better results than searching Google. Twitter may just be a collection of random thoughts, but in aggregate it has value. In aggregate, what you get is a direct view into any kind of sentiment. For companies trying to figure out what people are thinking about their brands, searching Twitter is probably a good place to look.’Real Time’ tweets certainly have a use for providing updates on ”Saved Alerts”, if for example I wanted to know what people are saying about this blog, I can type in ‘Seedcorn Capital’ as an alert and find out what is being said about this from the moment someone Tweets. Furthermore I can see the value of ‘Real Time’ for trends, words or phrases which are being referenced with more frequency, suggestive of something interesting which might be happening at this moment in time.
What happens to old Tweets….search maybe?
I cant stop thinking that whilst the ‘Real Time’ element of Twitter is very useful, it is not clear what happens to relevant search content that is a week or a month old (this has value for search purposes). Twitter’s current search is extremely crude. It simply brings up the most recent Tweets with the keyword you are looking for. Twitter needs to figure out how to extract the common sentiments from the Tweets. It is not exactly clear how to do this. OneRiot.com a search site set up on the back of Twitter, indexes tweets, looking for messages with embedded links, then crawls and indexes the content being linked to – the results are quite good. I am starting to see huge potential for Twitter to reinvent itself as a search engine of some sort if they manage to do this they stand to make lots of money – just look at the growth rates for search engine advertising in my last post!
