Twitter

• Twitter and it’s army of investors are getting a little too big for their britches. The micro-blogging phenomenon that has taken on a life of it’s own, says that that they will eventually be able to compete with Google in a different kind of search model. It’s because of this potential it sees in search that the Twitter co-founders walked away from a $500 million offer from Facebook, says Todd Chaffee, an Institutional Venture Partners general partner and a new Twitter backer. {adAge}
• Where as Google indexes everything available on the web, Twitter is the only search that can give people an immediate answer to “what’s happening — right now, or what was being discussed about a specific topic” Once the search platform becomes more robust and Twitter users become increasingly obsessed with hash tags, an AdWords type of business model could erupt. This is one of Twitter’s many “wild cards” says Chaffee. Once users are further trained, Twitter Search, just like the micro-blog platform, could take on a life of it’s own. What exactly do I mean? Let’s say every time you have a question on Twitter, and you add the hash tag, #question, to your query. It would be able to show up in the real-time Twitter Search engine to the entire community who could shoot you back an answer in seconds. Question/Answer based search is huge in places like Korea, where Google and Yahoo have failed miserably to break into the market. In the US, both Yahoo and Mahalo have tried to replicate the success of real-time human answers, but have had limited success…so far. It may just be Twitter that will be the one to do it, however the founders have no control over it. Twitter is having success for all different reasons, such as having mainstream news and blogs syndicating their stories, replacing the traditional RSS reader for most people (myself included, thanks to tweetDeck).
• I personally think that the ideas thrown around in the past to monetize Twitter, such as charging companies for Tweeting @ their followers is a ridiculous model. Continuing to build the platform and training users how to interact with the rest of the community through Twitter Search is a much better concept. Search is till a very small part of Twitter, but at the end of the day, I truly believe this is the only way that they will find any scalable model for making money. Even though I’ve heard the lame stories of Dell making $1 million through Twitter, there is no fair way to charge them for the service, when small businesses will just slide by. People don’t want to be pestered by companies, it just so happens that they don’t mind having to look at ads as long as they are relevant and wrapped around a service that is giving them something they can’t live without (this is why Google succeeds). So will Twitter be able to compete with Google? That’s for Twitterverse to decide and no one else.

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