Is Google worried about Twitter?
The explosion of Twitter usage this year has taken many of us in the online world by surprise. We knew the format would grow, purely by virtue of the growth of the industry as a whole, though the celebrity endorsements and blanket publicity fuelled rise to the level where it’s rivalling established giants of the social networking field like Facebook and MySpace has come as something of a shock. If you believe the rumours flying around, then the ruffled feathers extend further than just the social networking community, all the way to kings of the internet Google.
Journalists have long noted that Google CEO, Eric Schmidt is a little prickly about the subject of Twitter, refusing to use their brand name in public, referring to the phenomenon simply as micro blogging. Also, the general belief is that earlier in the year Google took a long hard look at actually buying the site, recently valued at $250 million(ish). So what has Google so worried? Is it simply a little bit of the green eyed monster regarding Twitter’s public profile, or does Google actually see the site as a competitor?
Well, in real terms, probably not, at least not yet. Twitter’s Search’s share of the search market is somewhere around the hundredth of a percent mark and though it will probably grow, it isn’t likely to actually become a player in terms of traditional search. The reason it can’t compete with Google directly is paradoxically also probably the reason that Google are taking notice, Twitter doesn’t work like a traditional search engine and, in fact, does something that Google can’t do, qualitative research.
If you’re looking for a fact or a particular thing (quantative information) then Google probably can’t be beaten. However, raw facts don’t encompass the entire sphere of human curiosity – not nearly. How many times have you asked your friends, ‘what do you reckon to this?’ ‘What do you think about that?’ what we’re doing here is trying to get a sense of the prevailing opinion about something so we have a context for our own, or consulting a peer group for opinions that may lead to greater understanding of an issue.
This is what Twitter is good for, we can consult our peer group’s opinion on a topic of the day through our followers, a group whose opinions we presumably respect, or we can take it one step further and consult the entirety of twitter and gauge the reaction to a story across the world which is the really useful thing that Twitter Search can do. Of course the results get cluttered by news and corporate tweets but if you can cut through all that then a consensus starts to emerge amongst the tweeters, what’s more it’s in real time! As any ad man will tell you, good market research is the cornerstone of any campaign. Twitter essentially offers a focus group of thousands for free.
It’s also good for breaking news, and I don’t mean the traditional ‘this happened in the last few hours’ breaking news, I mean breaking news. Michael Jackson tweets were up on Twitter within half an hour of the singer’s death after TMZ.com reported the incident a little over fifteen minutes after the fact. Yeah, it might not be the most reliable source but it has an immediacy that cannot be beaten.
I’ll give you a personal example. Last week there was a fire in Soho, a fact I knew before most as I was checking the Top Click Media Twitter page at the time and noticed that a follower, who works in that area of London had posted a tweet, something along the lines of ‘Oh my god, there’s a fire down the road.’ Out of interest, I loaded up the BBC News site, it wasn’t there, I then refreshed the page every 10 minutes to see how long it would take, an hour and a half later there was a preliminary report, by which time twitter had info on numbers of firemen, affected areas etc. Twitter one, BBC nil.
Over the next few years I would be staggered if many more people don’t start using Twitter for this kind of thing, already if I want to know about something that’s just happened I’ll load up twitter before Google News and If I want to get a feel for who will win X Factor, Twitter is far better placed to tell me than anything else.
So what does Google plan to do about it? Well, nothing’s confirmed but rumours abound, and it would be pretty naive to assume that somewhere within Google there aren’t one or two (or more) employees with IQ’s the size of cricket scores working on a response. Watch this space, I for one will be looking forward to seeing how Google can improve on Twitter’s winning formula.
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July 21st, 2009 at 3:14 am
I think Google should be worried about Twitter because, at the end of the day, Twitter shows the shift to the realtime web or live search or live web. And if Google doesn’t own it, someone else will.