Twitter’s growing focus on search, which makes complete sense strategically, is taking another important step with plans to start crawling links contained within updates. This will offer even more insight into what’s happening on the Web in real-time, and, arguably, make Twitter an increasingly interesting search player.
Santhose Jayaram, who recently joined Twitter from Google, told CNet’s Rafe Needleman about Twitter plans to also crate a reputation ranking system that will take into account the “reputation” of the person who did the update. He said Twitter is still working on how it would calculate someone’s reputation.
Strategically, a more advanced search engine could give Twitter more appeal as a takeover target – Steve Ballmer, for example, is making noise about how Microsoft has to get more disruptive in search. Better search could also jump-start Twitter’s business by providing more relevance and targeting for advertisers.
It’s encouraging to see Twitter become so aggressive about search given how most of its attention has been consumed by infrastructure issues, which were obviously necessary but nowhere near as sexy.
More: ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick has an interesting post looking at how Twitter has replaced tinyurl.com with bit.ly as its default URL shortener.
One Comment
This kind of live search, as well as emphasising identity (which is surely coming), really emphasise the value of Twitter. There's a lot of deep functionality you can get from a series of 140-character messages; I agree that it's refreshing to see them move beyond their engineering challenges and really starting to innovate in interesting ways.
I don't think it's coincidence that this information has been leaked just after all those stories about Twitter potentially being bought by various companies. The message is clear: they're bigger than that.
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[...] for example, is making noise about how Microsoft has to get more disruptive in search," says Buckpost at Twitterrati. "Better search could also jump-start Twitter’s business by providing [...]
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[...] have suggested it’s a good move for Twitter to focus on its strongest, and possibly most easily [...]
[...] for example, is making noise about how Microsoft has to get more disruptive in search," says Buckpost at Twitterrati. "Better search could also jump-start Twitter’s business by providing [...]
[...] for example, is making noise about how Microsoft has to get more disruptive in search," says Buckpost at Twitterrati. "Better search could also jump-start Twitter’s business by providing [...]