twitterking

Could twitter become the new king of search?  It seems as each day of 2009 goes by, my use of twitter is increasing.  Not only in terms of tweets, but in alternate uses for the service.  Most recently its Twitter Search that’s got my attention.  Although twitter does its best it seems to avoid you using the function (hiding the search button in the footer of the page), I’m using the facility more and more.

Twitter search has the potential to pull together several strands from three core search markets.  Search Engines, Research and Recommendation.

Google dominates the Engine market, and shows no sign of giving up its crown to any time soon.  The problem with search indexing, is its driven by mathematical algorithms.  Not people.  Its fast, mainly efficient, but rarely personal.  Its also more importantly out of date.  No matter how fast google builds its process, its never able to maintain pace with the real time information as it comes available.  Let alone index that information in context to what’s already here.

Research is owned by wikipedia, with a market share which puts even google in the shade.  Drawing on human input the sites has managed to bring the encyclopaedia firmly into the 21st century.  Sure there are issues with credibility on some documents, but largely the site has been a huge, self policing success.  Its also got a huge advantage over any potential rivals, its FREE.

The recommendation market is still highly fragmented.  Sites such as digg, delicious, stumbleupon all fight amongst each other for pieces of a market which has yet to develop a viable commercial model.  The concept that people favour personal recommendations over anything else has surely been proven, but producing profitable revenue streams from that behaviour has still proven illusive.

So how can twitter search change all that?  Well its possible that when a site reaches a tipping point and user interaction gets so great, humans actually become a viable network alternative to computers themselves.  I see a time approaching when you can push out your question, whether that be finding a web site, researching a project, or getting recommendations on a product or service.  The answers you receive will be real-time, and from real people.

All Twitter needs to do, and i say that with a slight tongue in cheek, is find a way of filtering the noise more effectively.  I’d personally like to see them develop a “topic/subject engine”.  Allowing you to mine a stream of tweets/conversations in real time.  Enabling you to talk directly into a massive group of people who are interested in your topic at that exact moment.  That level of interaction has not been seen at this stage, but its surely just aroud the corner.

friendconnect

A lot has been spoken about google over the past years, but at the heart of their business they are far more fragile than the IBM’s and Microsofts of two decades ago.  Their business is firmly built on one form of revenue, and that hangs of the back of one form of search.  If consumer behaviour moves from static search results to real-time.  Then google could find its revenue falling as quickly as it climbed.  We need to remember their revenue model is barely six years old, and certainly not written in stone.  I’m sure google is more than aware of this growing threat, as evidenced by its moves into various social markets over the past few months.  Most recently with Friend Connect.  How long before they make a serious approach to twitter itself?  Or will they make the same mistake as yahoo, when google was just a flea on their own back.

Watch this space…..