Pardon the semi-link-bait of the title, but I finally have something to say about this whole “Twitter is a Google Killer!” or “Google is merging/buying Twitter” news-meme that’s plaguing us all. And it all comes from (finally!) listening to David Weinberger’s talk about “knowledge at the end of the Information Age”.
In the hour-long podcast (originally broadcast on TV, I imagine), Weinberger speaks about the triumphs and weirdness of the internet have done for knowledge. One of his key insights is that the internet really opened up meta-data: when search can be ubiquitous, we don’t need to limit ourselves to three (or five, or any arbitrary number of) tags or categories to fit a piece into, unlike the Library of Congress.
That got me thinking: Google’s PageRank is, admittedly, a really useful system. But I think Google really won because they found a clean and efficient way to sort through the meta-data before any of their competitors did. And yes, I remember Altavista’s ability to search a database of MP3s or images, and I imagine other search engines had it too. But Google made it both intuitive and relevant (more often than not).
That, dear readers, is why I believe that Twitter’s real-time search won’t be a Google Killer yet: before it can be, it needs to be able to sort through the meta-data, to fit its real-time results into the mold that its users aren’t asking for, but are hoping to see.
And no, Tweefind, an attempt to apply PageRank to Twitter just ain’t gonna cut it.
