At a dinner tonight with a friend the conversation turned to Twitter. He just didn’t get it, and he’s certainly not the first person to tell me that. Specifically, my friend didn’t understand the massive valuation ($250 million or more) that Twitter won in its recent funding. I told him why I thought it was more than justified: Twitter is, more than anything, a search engine.
I told him what I thought of Twitter as a micro-blogging service: it’s a collection of emotional grunts. But it’s wonderful nonetheless. And enough people are hooked on it that Twitter has reached critical mass. If something big is going on in the world, you can get information about it from Twitter.
Twitter also gathers other information, like people’s experiences with products and services as they interact with them. A couple of months ago, for example, I was stuck in the airport and received extremely poor service from Lufthansa. I twittered my displeasure, which made me feel better – at least I was doing something besides wait in an endless line. I’ve also Twittered complaints about the W Hotel (no Internet, cold room) and Comcast (the usual Internet gripes).
More and more people are starting to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time as they interact with them. And those brands want to know all about it, whether to respond individually (The W Hotel pestered me until I told them to just leave me alone), or simply gather the information to see what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.
And all of it is discoverable at search.twitter.com, the search engine that Twitter acquired last summer.
People searching for news. Brands searching for feedback. That’s valuable stuff.
Twitter knows it, too. They’re going to build their business model on it. Forget small time payments from users for pro accounts and other features, all they have to do is keep growing the base and gather more and more of those emotional grunts. In aggregate it’s extremely valuable. And as Google has shown, search is vastly monetizable – somewhere around 40% of all online advertising revenue goes to ads on search listings today.
And as John Battelle says, its not clear that Google or anyone else can compete with Twitter at this point (Facebook’s giving it a solid try, though).
And it’s not just ads that can bring in the money. Brands need tools to make sense of all this data that Twitter doesn’t yet supply. Third parties like Scout Labs are going to be mining this data themselves, I’m sure. But there are lots of other ways Twitter can tax the utility they are bringing to brands. If they manage to turn down the acquisition offers like Facebook did a couple of years ago, there’s no reason Twitter can’t find revenue streams that will support them as a standalone company. Possibly even a public one.
I’ve been saying that for the past 6 months. I use it to search for things before searching Google.
It was just last week that I proposed amongst friends that Twitter adopt the Google way of selling search advertising on Twitter Search. Companies can purchase ads when people search for a specific keywords.
Yep, you nailed it as always Mike. Missed you around TC.
No ads, no ads, that’s why it’s so special right now. I know I am wishing into the wind.
more and more of my searching is going to twitter & getting excellent results. they shouldn’t rely only on the google ads model for revenue though.
Is it search, or research???
I actually did a post a couple of days ago, on The Daily Hack, about a Greasemonkey script you can use in FireFox which allows you to get real-time Twitter search results on Google, every time you do a search. It lists the top 5 most recent tweets on the subject you’re searching for at the top of the Google search results page. It’s actually quite an interesting tool.
Do I think that Twitter will eventually become the king of search? Probably not, but I do know that since I’ve become a member I have been doing a lot less Googling. I guess time will tell.
BTW, if you’re interested, here’s the link to my post on The Daily Hack, that I was talking about earlier:
http://www.dail...me-twitter.html
I’ve been using that too, it’s useful indeed. It fits in really well too – looks just like the News results you sometimes get above the organic search.
I was not a believer till a few minutes ago. Cape Town (South Africa) has some major fires and the best real time data can be found on twitter.
http://search.t...rch?q=cape+town
backtype.com does this and has a broad reach. wisdom of crowds is myth. a handful of unbiased experts is all the reference users ever need. realtime is everywhere……why anyone would think it is faster or more relevant on twitter is beyond me. i tend to agree with dans comment below regarding the timing of this blog.
BlogLocator.com – always write, never wrong
>wisdom of crowds is myth.
um, no, not really. but it’s also not a perfect concept (as with anything)
>…unbiased experts…
joke?
>realtime is everywhere…
realtime what is everywhere? realtime news? I (and others) disagree. most “realtime” news that the average person has access to is 1) overwhelmingly local and 2) not realtime and not as close to realtime one might like
>why anyone would think it is faster or more relevant on twitter is beyond me.
evidently
Hell… search “EARTHQUAKE” – @journik
many of theresults are trash/noise though
Adam – if you recall at the Teens in Tech Conference (http://www.teensintechconf.com), we used Twitter Search during the Teen Developer panel and all questions got asked through Twitter. We put Twitter search on the projectors and watching as hundreds of questions got asked via Twitter. In 30 minutes, we became the #1 search term beating the Super Bowl a day before the big game! That’s the power of Twitter.
But what’s to prevent Google from creating a micro-blogging search service that aggregates everything, like what they haven’t done with blog search? At that point a Twitter proprietary search just can’t provide as much value add. I think a better business mode for Twitter is in capitalizing on their content, like providing streamlined user opinion to brands, as well as on their knowledge of user behavior and interaction.
This is what Twingly does: http://www.twin...microblogsearch
“Twitter has reached critical mass.”
Not even close on that quote Mike.
Twitter is awesome as a search engine. If you have a problem with a company, etc. Just Blog about it on Twitter, and soon you should find your problem resolved!
I agree, and I think it’s funny that everyone’s now raving about Twitter’s real-time search but that they would have likely paid less attention to that part of the story hadn’t Summize come along and showed what the value of it was.
Very smart acquisition that was.
Indeed.
When GMail had an outage the other day, I didn’t use Google to search for more information about it.
Instead I directly went to search.twitter.com.
Great acquisition for twitter, and even better for summize, if they did indeed take stake. The part that always amazed me about that acquisition was how little Summize actually looked like a twitter search tool back in the day.
Also, a great channel for question answering!
Yep, twitter search is a tremondous asset. The next big thing is definitely about collecting and analyzing the sentiment of crowds, twitter and facebook are the big consumer internet wins, companies like visible technologies also look like good potential wins because of this trend.
Absolutely agree, Twitter allows you to contently keep in touch with your friends and colleagues with out the need to read allot of information – there is something magical in getting snippets of information. This is why text messaging is also
I already do. If I need to find out about something established, I’ll use Google. But if I need to find out about something happening NOW, it can only be Twitter.
This is well put. Twitter isn’t a search engine. That’s a ridiculous statement. What Twitter is, is a huge repository of what people are chattering about right now in real-time, and the ability to search that content yields interesting results. Depending on what you’re looking for, those results might be better than Google’s or Yahoo’s – especially if you’re after what’s happening now. Internet search engines will take a while to index new content; Twitter’s will be more responsive.
This acquisition was indeed a brilliant stroke. But it doesn’t make Twitter “a Search Engine.” It’s a microblogging service that’s searchable, which isn’t the same thing. I know semantic precision is out of style these days, but with emerging concepts like this it seems important to be clear about what we mean.
I like the way you write, Louisa. Very concise and precise. Good job at providing a short explanation about Twitter. Appreciate it!
Chris: if Twitter is a great search engine (it is) then friendfeed is even better (it is too).
I think the difference is that Twitter has gone more mainstream and avoids a bit of the echo chamber affect of FF. This makes the content it’s searching a little more relevant.
Given the same userbase, I agree, FF’s content will be better. But, That’s a really big assumption.
@Michael wrote: "Twitter also gathers other information, like peopleâs experiences with products and services as they interact with them." Damn straight!
I agree 500%, Twitter is a search engine. In fact, it’s a people powered search engine that provides users with different layers of search which is organic and modular.
I just wrote an interesting article on how the latest facelift of Facebook would impact Twitter. Have a read and RT. It may even help your mate
)
Thanks.
Hi – your article sounds great – do you have a link?
Thanks!
Hye mate, just click on my name. It will take u to my blog.
Thanx
)
Disregard previous comment, Iconic88. I read your articles; interesting. Thanks.
I think you just prove, that 100% of twitter users are dumb as a brick: You can’t agree to something more than 100%…
Iconic 88: I’d like to read the article you mentioned (about Facebook and Twitter) but I can’t link to your blog for some reason…..?
The unbelievers haven’t fully realised the potential of twitter.
most people are probably too involved with facebook and don’t understand the difference between tweets and status updates.
i’ve been preaching the value of twitter to everyone around me and slowly people are getting the message.
what is the difference between tweets and status updates?
tim, you can’t do searches on status updates and because of the public nature of twitter, tweets aren’t just focused on day to day personal life.
people tweet about important news, technology, developments and give mini reviews of products.
even if people on facebook do this, there is no public search function to make status updates open to the wider web community.
What’s the difference between Twitter and the e-mail listserv’s that have been around for 20 years?
i guess if you’re happy with listserv then stick with it.
i doubt you will get as much awareness as twitter
I WISH companies would use Twitter search to see what their brands are doing. Maybe it’s like that in the US, but here in Europe…nothing.
Twitter Search is perfect. Use it all the time to see how product A or B is doing, ~ reviews, exchange, etc.
It’s about time that Twitter-critics understand this important factor.
I know a fair amount of European companies from various industries who actively track Twitter conversations, though.
I know for a fact that O2 (mobile network operator in the UK) monitor Twitter.
Back in October i had a bad experience with them with regards to an upgrade to an iPhone and O2 simply just not meeting my needs. After half a dozen phone calls, where they said they’d upgrade me the following month, only to deny they’d ever said that when i called, i was just going in circles, getting more frustrated. ONE tweet venting my frustration and a member of the digital customer relations team (or something similar to that) replied to me, struck up and email conversation and had an iPhone in my hand within a week. Sorted. Well done to O2….in the end.
The “twitter search is perfect” line got me thinking. And blogging. I posted some ways I thought the search could be improved, or even monetized. http://www.cape...tter-search.php
Cheers,
@chadrem
The people who bother to post or Twitter about a product are the ones at the extreme (very dissatisfied or very satisfied), not a representation of actual customer sentiment. Amazon reviews have this problem too, of course, but it’s somewhat mitigated by the fact that people know it as a review site, and don’t HAVE to have had some unusually strong experience to think of writing a review.
just an example to add to jke’s point.
in the UK there are more people tweeting in a small midland town called Coventry than in the bustling business capital of London.
see the following PR Week UK article for details:
http://www.prwe...er-controversy/
I think companies like Twitter, that their core competency is not technology (like Google) but the community (as more people use it the more it adds value) need to monetize their service before something new and trendy might still their thunder.
These companies are in a higher risks then technology driven services: Google crawlers will always keep on crawling the web, will Twitter users will always keep on twitting? not sure.
Twitter search is a cool feature for search engines , maybe even important to some sectors, but not a replacement of any kind to the traditional search engines.
Actually that’s not quite true. FriendFeed search is good for right now searches too.
Haha. You got there before me Mr Scoble.
Chris: and friendfeed lets you search ALL web data types, not just Tweets. And you can search, say, ONLY by a single datatype (like YouTube videos). The advanced search here is really awesome.
robert -
while you are correct about friendfeed, they are not the one’s getting all the PR, twitter is – so even if friendfeed is doing more, who do you think will win in the end?
FF is way too complex for 99% of the people to grasp.
While everyone seems to be taken with Twitter, there are search engines that provide an aggregated search across all microblogs, such as http://www.samepoint.com. It seems to me that aggregating data across all microblogging platforms (not just Twitter), or social bookmarks, or comments, etc. gives you a more accurate representation of people’s attitudes towards a particular brand, product, person, etc.
Me too. I use Twitter and Friendfeed to help promote products/services and engage individuals for the company I work at.
have to agree with Robert, the search feature on FF is great. Well, after all Paul and Co. came from google right?
(Twitter+FF+Google) search is most comprehensive.
But Twitter has a massive audience, FriendFeed does not (yet). For what it’s worth: http://siteanal....com/?metric=uv
It really is like a real-time search engine. Chances are you can find an interesting or breaking story faster using Twitter than you can using a Google search. You are also likely to find more interesting perspectives and discussions in Twitter than using a traditional search engine.
Robin: yeah. a huge audience of non participants. Want me to demonstrate this? And, anyway, friendfeed is growing faster than Twitter did. So I’m not too worried about the audience size showing up. If that mattered then Twitter itself doesn’t matter because Facebook is much larger than Twitter is.
i agree however that samepoint.com seems to search across more than friendfeed and others. it’s pretty comprehensive but also a little overwhelming.
search and research
I think the clue was when Google CEO said of Twitter “whose search index doesn’t keep up with converasations as quickly as Twitter’s”.
http://tinyurl.com/dxtzfn
So Twitter’s a search engine eh?
“how high is mount everest”
Twitter: nothing
Google: Elevation: 8,848 metres (29,029 FT) Ranked 1st
Ok, maybe it’s not good with facts, but good with products:
“best video card”
Twitter: useless results after long wait
Google: tons of links to video card benchmark reviews
If Twitter is a search engine, it’s arguably the worst, slowest search engine I’ve ever seen. Worse than Powerset and Cuil.
FriendFeed at least has some ranking capability due to the “Like” feature, and arguably a richer source of information both from a metadata aspect, as well as comments. But still, pale in comparison to mailing lists, blogs, and USENET for actual, real honest to goodness informative articles.
Disclaimer: I may have been sipping on the Twitter kool-aid a little too much lately.
You and others are thinking about it wrong.
No one is arguing that Twitter is a replacement for Google or the second coming of Christ (Ok, TechCrunch might think that). The true value of Twitter is that it is the search engine of the people in real time.
A great example is of using Twitter as a search engine is what happened to a group of us last weekend. We wanted to know the snow conditions at Tahoe. We looked at skireport.com, onthesnow.com, weather.com, and Google but the best information came from Twitter.
We learned that certain lifts were closed due to high winds. We saw TwitPics of the great snow that was coming down on other parts of the mountain. We knew that the restaurant was serving up great meals. It was details of the NOW. You cannot get that with Google. I haven’t climbed Mt. Everest yet but I would definitely like to read people’s tweets that were currently on the mountain if I was.
Do you want to know if the @jimmyeatworld concert was good tonight in San Francisco? (Honestly, I don’t.) Do you want to know if the general opinion of the current episode of LOST is good or crap? Just search for it on Twitter. People’s reactions and opinions of current trends, situations, and events are truly powerful.
Twitter is more than 140 characters. It is the voice of the people … take it for the good or bad but it isn’t complete shit (unlike my grammar).
You see it a little now now but over the next year you will see status updates on Facebook and Twitter be used more on a daily basis in thousands of ways (e.g. polling questions from the public, breaking news and events, and getting immediate responses to endless questions).
Keep an eye on Facebook and FriendFeed too. They both got game.
And to all you haters all I gots to say is … I’m On A Boat Bitches. http://www.yout...h?v=R7yfISlGLNU
I think that someone hit the nail on the head with the “research” “search” distinction.
I need to find out if there is a Citibank in a particular part of China.
On Google, I was able to find out where all of the Chinese Citibanks are located = Research.
On Twitter, I found on emotional rant and a conversation between two people that only they could understand = Search.
I love search.twitter although I’m not a twitter fan (prefer Brightkite).
Please, please no ads on twitter or search.twitter! There has to be some other way to work it out.
completely agree with Ray. twitter is a great source for the immediate content. but as a repository of searchable knowledge its currently very limited.
And yes, there is something to be said for the ‘wisdom of crowds’ when considering the reliability of the information extracted. but remember that the ‘crowd’ today skew high for certain age, sex and industry/occupation.
..hence i won’t be using twitter for sourcing thoughts on late-Roman european pottery
I always have for the 2 years I’ve been on Twitter. It’s just now it’s more populated so the search is more useful.
It’s so simple it’s almost stupid, but damn it’ll be worth a fortune.
Today I complimented @netregistry, I bagged out @optus and @telstra
PS. Welcome back Mike.
Facebook matters, Twitter matters, FriendFeed matters. But real-time search for quick & dirty research based on conversations is Twitter’s turf atm.
Robin: that’s true, but watch the behavior change over the next year. friendfeed has a lot more metadata to study for searching and THAT will get noticed long term.
Here’s why. Here I can search all tweets for the word "obama" but only get displayed those tweets that have gathered two or more likes and four or more comments, for instance. You can’t do that over on Twitter search.
Robin, here, try this search of tweets: http://friendfe...s=2&likes=2 — you can’t do that on Twitter itself. No metadata to study there!
The only link that is missing yet at Twitter search is that the realtime interaction with the search results is not integrated yet.
What I mean by this is instead of filtering the tweets in realtime for the keyword `mp3 player`, what about directly injecting a question like `which mp3 player is the best` in the public timeline and that you can see the responses on this question appear in realtime in your set of results?
Yes, you might think this is already possible by simply tweeting on your page, but unless you are Michael Arrington, your question doesnt have that critical massa reach.
Try Yahoo Answers (answers.yahoo.com). It’s designed for exactly the scenario you mention. Unfortunately, it doesn’t get much hype in the digerati circles because it’s from Yahoo, and also because Yahoo is not promoting it real well, but it actually has some real traction with the more “mainstream” online crowd.
Try rightbrain search at http://search.tEarn.com/
Ask, get photo, video, and Twitter responses.
Robin: compare that graph with this: http://www.grap....com&url4=# ….makes the gap between Twitter and FF so insignificant.
slayerboy: not to mention that Twitter is 1.5 years older than friendfeed. Move the graph over to match each service’s age and you’ll see friendfeed is growing faster than twitter was.
Twitter = Wikipedia
This is the risk for investors. Like Wikipedia, Twitter may end up as an incredible source of information created by army of volunteers, but which resists effective monetization.
While reputation and sentiment tracking is a reasonable business, it’s a far cry from the goldmine of advertising alongside commerce-related searches.
The question is whether a person considering buying brand X is likely to consult Twitter first. And that in turn depends on how many people who just bought X are motivated to Twitter about their experience, versus the ease with which X can create (or buy) positive Twitter spam.
Lets get some things straight here.
With the monmouth Facebook announcement yesterday, I said to myself “watch Techcrunch go hard trying to find some relevance for Twitter”.. and here we are…
There is no value in Twitter search when posts are only 140 characters long, what are you searching for, when someone went to get a haircut?
Twitter’s core is a great idea, but thats it a great idea, not a $55 million dollar business model and now the collective is in panic, rightfully so.
The common person just does not “get” Twitter, most of them send text and blackberry pushmails to friends, and have been doing so for years.
Do you really think that many people want to let people know what they are doing at all times, kind of creepy for the non-geek.
Twitter has not come up with anything else to offer. They couldn’t start to build social networking parts into their site to keep people ON the site?
When I search on Google or Wikipedia, I know I am going to get a wealth of information for the subject matter, again, were the hell is the value in searching a 140 character limited service that really comes off as a cyber stalker’s dream tool.
Twitter just got Netscaped guys, please accept it.
Huzzah! Thank you for posting some basic common sense!
I don’t think anyone is debating whether or not the service has any value. But when it really comes down to it, Twitter is a feature, not a business model. Everyone is excited about the utility, but where’s the revenue?
Revenue? There are too many ways to make money once data is there. real-time data mining, real-time advertisement, and lot more…
Dan you have it exactly right, the search might find things about whats going on now or groupthink, or whatever, but filtering all these messages is the worst. I find most of the information useless outside of the links, but i can go to google or delicious for links. Finding relevant results based on keywords is terrible. What 90% of people have to say is useless. I wish people would go back to writing regular blog posts instead of hanging out on twitter. I can’t wait till this fad is over ..
actually Dan, the value is precisely in the fact that the results are limited to 140 characters.
During the oscars for example, it was easy to get a sense of people’s reactions to Jackman as a host or any number of other things related to the event. People will tweet who won’t bother to write up a blog post. These are shallow perceptions, and individually they are not that interesting, but collectively they are very powerful.
If you are a brand of any kind and care about what people are saying about you, twitter search lets you scan the opinions of thousands of users at once, and this has immense value.
Ok I see your point:
From that end the search is valuable. If they just inserted small adds between Tweets and in the search results, i guess the point can be made that they could do an Adsense move..
I am sure likely then they are working on these types of ideas.
Yes, this is true, but http://search.twitter.com is *not* a replacement for the now-defunct track functionality. I want the searches to come to me in real-time rather than having to go look them up myself.
I told people back when it worked that I would pay a ton of money for that feature alone.
Hopefully they’ll bring it back.
Yay, now I can search useless posts on peoples lives.
/sarcasm
as i said in a tweet:
what comes after google(search engine)?a mining engine to feel the pulse of the reality?
yes.
Google is The Past.
Twitter is The Current.
Marketing will need to follow: http://bit.ly/E8JQE
Lifehacker has a great post on a greasemonkey script that integrates twitter search into google, check it out.
http://bit.ly/eb6PM
Is Twitter the new Second Life?
I think we all established this a while ago, I know I did when I set up my account, I guess we’re all in agreement that that Twitter is a search engine and the business model is scaled on this.
Yesterday commented on :The Future of Twitter: Integrated Search, Trends, Featured Users http://burnurl.com/vp6zI7”
http://disqus.c...illiams/follow/
Twitter does not generate revenue, Facebook is generating $15m pa in digital (Ads) gifts!
Facebook is the “whole customer experience encompassing suite of Social Media components”
I like twitter search, however am often frustrated that tweets older than a month aren’t included in results. Likely an issue of Twitter’s data storage capacity, however still bothersome not being able to retrieve old tweets from the archive
it’s twimendous!
I remember a Panel discussion, I think it was at Davos with Michael Arrington and Chad Hurley (youtube founder).
Chad was telling the audience that Youtube was one of the most important search engine in volume in the US, and Google had seen that coming. And people often forget that Youtube is a search engine after all.
Now if the “real time” web stands out as the next evolution of search instead of the so called “semantic” search, Google or Microsoft may take a closer look at Twitter.
Twitter as a Media has a very strong base of users who just love it.
Besides enjoying the service, they discuss it kind of the way television likes to discuss Television, or Journalists like to discuss journalism.
This is I believe the ultimate empirical demonstration that Twitter is different than Facebook or anything else because it has become a media by itself.
Anyway, I think the “real time” search/web is pretty exciting!
I totaly agree with this , twitter is the new search engine OF people who have the same interests than us. Marketing people can also use it as many as they want, THEY should !
Twitter buys Bit.ly and when you do a Twitter search for a topic the most RT links (10 most popular) appears in the Twitter search interface. Thus making them a Google competitor!
That’s one of many possible scenarios that could occur. Twitter are well positioned and as Mike states as long as they can turn down the acquisition offers then the future is bright!
Twitter search mashup: http://lt.linkstore.ru
Lets you check out tweets in your area
It is sure that Twitter is becoming an important search engine. In particular if you are looking for particular person who have the same interests than you have, moreover thx to one or two keywords! Marketing peopke should have to use it more and more, maybe it let them us to gain time in their jobs of analyses, researches …
yes. its time to get ready for social search.
very good article… here is a real time twitter (pic, topics, files, google map) search engine… http://Asktwitr.com
Ick. My first try, I found that site absolutely useless.
“Real time?” I searched for the Kepler mission, which might launch tomorrow, and only got front-loaded with references to museums in Germany, photos of cats, and a video of the Backstreet Boys.
Some interesting points from about friendfeed’s growth and potential. For me, Twitter is almost mainstream, friendfeed will probably never be.
I’ve seen twitter. If mainstream hackers and trolls ever figure it’s out there it will be dead.
It’s incredibly useless. About as much as Google apps.
Of course, Google seems to be great for finding porn.