Searching Twitter

So there have been some recent developments in the past week that have received a good deal of news. First off, Microsoft thought that it was going to make a decent cut into Google's mammoth share of the search market through a deal with Twitter which would allow tweets to show up in Bing searches. Unfortunately (for Microsoft) Google managed to make a deal of their own with Twitter so that tweets will also show up in Google searches. While Bing might still have the upper-hand since its Twitter search is already live, I want to take a moment to grieve for the older forms of searching Twitter.

The New York Times had a good article this week about Twitter's approach to innovation. At this point, the concept of the "democratization of innovation" is probably familiar to most people who know a thing or two about the interwebs, but Twitter was pretty exceptional in its adherence to a credo of bottom-up innovation. At the outset, the service afforded only the ability to write "micro-blogs" of 140 characters. Methods of searching these micro-blogs developed organically by twitterers themselves. Nearly every search convention:

1. The '@' before the screen name of another user
2. The letters 'RT' before a reproduction of something that already been tweeted (or a "re-tweet")
3. The '#' used before a certain topic so that topics with more than one word were easily searchable (e.g., #iranelection)
4. Even the term 'tweet' to refer to a single micro-blog

...all of these were developed by twitter users and later adopted as standard form by Twitter developers. Now that Microsoft and Google are in on the game....sigh. So much for democracy.

Admittedly, it's too early to tell what kind of affect this new way to search Twitter is going to have on things like the use of the hash tag, but it's pretty easy to see why Microsoft and Google want to get in on the Twitter action. Back in March, on the Tech Crunch blog, Michael Arrington wrote a post about just how useful Twitter is to businesses. Because tweets are so short, many people (and I mean MANY) use Twitter to do nothing more than gripe about things, especially their experiences with products. One can only imagine how useful this information is to businesses. In fact this information is SO useful, that Twitter, itself, has been valued at nearly $1 Billion, even though it has around 35 million users (compared to Facebook's 175 million). With that kind of valuation, it's surprising that Twitter hasn't decided to cash in and (like Facebook) allow more ad space. Since Twitter is so amenable to being searched, however, they may never have to get into the ad game in order to make serious money. Here's to hoping that Twitter holds-on to its original democratic, bottom-up approach to innovation despite all of the corporate interest.