twitter search: consumption becomes conspicuous
On Thursday, Twitter launched it’s search box universally throughout the twitter service. Quoting from the Twitter Blog announcement.
With this newly launched feature, Twitter has become something unexpectedly important—a discovery engine for finding out what is happening right now. (emphasis added)
Twitter, the business, is making important intentions known. Search is core to their evolving model. It’s rapidly stepping up from the original founder’s concept of people updating each other with status messages into a role as a dominating force in the evolution of the live web.
From Wired Magazine’s interview with co-founder Biz Stone last August, this has been a predictable development:
One of Twitter’s most likely revenue streams is through advertisements in search results where messages could be tied to what users were searching on. Twitter recently purchased Summize, a search engine specifically designed to sift through Twitter messages, for a reported $15 million in cash and stock.
making consumption conspicuous
Mashable did an interesting survey this weekend, which begins with the twitter headline “is RSS reading dead“? Put another way, with the rise in Twitter as a hot new method to alert consumers to new content, RSS aggregation might be looking old school.
As more and more media is “pushed out” via tweets, the Twitter infrastructure is poised to collect up the bread crumb trail of your participation, and aggregate trends and behavior. The notion of being able to real-time track your movement and consumption patterns of content is a big deal. Especially when the content has commercial relevance and intent.
the path to follow
This is a very delicate evolution in the works here. The simplicity and mass consumer appeal of Twitter feels very “Craigslist-like” to me. Twitter is a very different company, building a business that feels more infrastructure-centric. However, their success hinges on the continued momentum of mass consumer participation.
The founders and investors of Twitter are demonstrating that they won’t follow the tenacity that Craig Newmark has shown in sticking with a simple destination site and ignore commercial options which risk consumer loyalty. How this plays into the evolution of Twitter as a consumer service will be fun to watch.
May 4th, 2009 at 9:47 am
Indeed. The thing I find fascinating about Twitter search is that you are searching (real-time) conversations. So, businesses can search for consumers who might need them and look to engage in that conversation. This has the potential to invert the model. Looking for a plumber? Just tweet it and let them come to you.
Of course, there is also a huge risk that the signal to noise ratio will degrade as more people try to read ‘commercial intention’ in to every tweet.