As I among many others have speculated recently, Twitter has now essentially become a real-time search engine. The transformation was completed today with the introduction of a new homepage design with the search box front and center.
In order to view the search capability, one must be logged out of any Twitter account. The idea is to get first time users into the service by displaying tweets that are relevant to a search. According to Twitter CEO Biz Stone, ”Helping people access Twitter in more relevant and useful ways upon first introduction lowers the barrier to accessing the value Twitter has to offer and presents the service more consistently with how it has evolved.”
So why is real-time search such a big deal? Here are several instances where real-time beats ”Google speed” every time.
1. Breaking News – Although it’s become a bit of a morbid death watch, one learns first of tragedy and triumph via real-time search. The classic example of news being disseminated via Twitter was the miraculous emergency landing in the Hudson River by US Airways flight 1549 in January. Before any of the major news outlets even knew that the incident had happened, Twitter was abuzz with details and even an incredible eye witness photo of the plane with the saved passengers spread out on the wings. But that was just the tip of what will be an enormous iceberg of news delivered directly from newsmakers onto Twitter. Consider the recent tweet by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger when his plane made a ‘quick, steep, but safe’ emergency landing after the pilot reported smoke coming from the cockpit’s instrument panel.
2. Pure Opinion – Other search engines have gotten just a bit too picky lately. You almost never see a genuine from the heart feeling in a search result anymore. It’s all about keyword densities, title tags, links, and anchor text. Well real people writing real things don’t give a crap about those technical hurdles that Google and the other search engines throw up at you to keep you off the front page. With a real-time Twitter search you get unvarnished reality screaming through at you. Sometimes it’s pretty ugly. Most of the time it’s very useful though.
3. The ”Speed of the Read” – I just coined that term to refer to how easy it is to plow through search results. Not the snippets presented by the search engines, but the actual results. Who wants to go to a page that takes forever to read, or one that just has a bunch of junk on it? With Twitter the search results are the tweets themselves. And guess what? They are never more than 140 characters, ever. That makes them easy and fast to digest. Cool.
4. Google is Old, Twitter is New – People like new things. Well, new and useful things. That’s what Twitter is. The Internet has changed dramatically since Google was founded in 1998. Google hasn’t. It’s still basically the same thing we had back then. There’s nothing wrong with that, but shouldn’t search have evolved somehow in a decade? Then along comes Twitter with real-time search. Who knows if it’s really any better or not – but it is definitely different and new. According to my friends over at UK hosting company 34SP.com, that’s interesting. Daniel Foster, co-founder of 34SP.com stated, ”You see this a lot with hosting companies touting ‘new’ services to attract buyers. In fact, on our website right now we have a ‘new’ graphic for our recently introduced Professional Hosting product. It’s true. People like new things.”
To view the new Twitter homepage visit: http://twitter.com.
To read the entire blog post on the changes to the site from the CEO go here: http://blog.twitter.com/2009/07/new-front-page.html.
