Today, ReadWriteWeb.com posted a great article about “Twitter Crowns Bit.ly As The King of Short Links; Here’s What It Means”., as they put it simply about the truth about “Bit.ly”, the URL shortening service, is that its not a URL shortener, its a trend management and metrics platform. It says that

“People share links to pages in the following ways: by email, on Facebook, on Twitter and through countless other methods. The company that does the best job analyzing that sharing activity and creating a compelling user experience based on it is likely to become a very big deal”

It further concludes:

We don’t want to argue that Bit.ly is the next Google, but the technology it’s brought to market could be very important in the indexing of the social web.

Pulling out Google card got me thinking, thinking hard and way back to pre-Google era, and how searches/indexing/analyzing social web could possibly introduce another Google to the world. Following is what I was thinking out loud, and posted as comment to ReadWriteWeb’s blog post (too long, I know). I hope it can speak to the average Joe.

Let me think out loud: before Google, we searched the web and never could find the relevant website for the keywords. Google came out combing through it with page-rank (algorithms involving huge linear/non linear algebra metrics), then the web became an orderly place when we came to Google’s site.

Now imagine the social web, to simplify the matter, imagine social web being only twitter (which is a good assumption), is it a place with order? Are we frustrated that we can’t seem to find the right…hm…tweets with the right link pointing to the website linked upon by social web? For example, Maybe I am looking for the right tweets pointing me the right resources about Portland since I am about to visit (not really) there, search.twitter.com does not rank the resulting tweets on its search page so I have no way to know which one is a good tweet, maybe with a resourceful link. With Tweepz.com, search results show people with “Portland” in their profile, and you can filter the results in a variety of ways, such as # of followers, join dates etc., but it’s not enough, the filter is too minimal, I still can not find the right people/tweets/links. So let’s try twazzup.com, which is much more advanced as it pulls up most recent tweets with “visit portland” along with “top tweets”, “most popular links”, although I have no idea how they are placed/indexed/sorted. Nevertheless twazzup is one step closer to ideal results about “visit Portland”

With a super smart Bit.Ly, tons of data can be pulled out through its API, service like search.twitter.com or Twazzup could aggregate that “link” data, slice/dice it and present along with the search results which will be better than currently served, which also makes me think: would URL shortening service become the engine of next “social web page ranker”? Or will search engines such as search.twitter.com, twazzup, or tweepz (if they catch on soon) be the driving force? Maybe a solution completely new will emerge, or maybe one will acquire another to form a joint force to present an ultimate “social web Page ranking machine”, and that machine will be key to finding the right information.

So, would the next big player be Bit.Ly, or someone else combining the analysis seen on bit.ly, along with semantic analysis of the tweets?

I hope I am making sense for you of this social web search phenomenon, and through which we will understand where to focus our energy.

Not long ago, @garyvee (of course twitter tag) suggested in a highly popular video that it’s a nonsense to worry about how twitter will monetize. He pulled up “search.twitter.com” to show it’s in a similar situation as Google, only without ads…end of the story.

It strike me as a bold statement, to say the least, although it’s inspiring. I did not think twitter will invest big time on “search.twitter.com”.

I am right. At least if twitter wasn’t pulling off a April 1st game.

Today (April the fools day) Biz Stone announced twitter’s new search feature. (twitter acquired “Summize”: a 5 person search startup back in July 2008) using Twitter’s words “Currently, a small subset of Twitter users are trying this new search feature in the sidebar of their Twitter home page. When you do a search, you don’t go to another page, the relevant tweets instantly show up where you’d expect them to—right on your home page where tweets love to be.”

I am one of the small subset, I did a quick search for “wine” and got tons of tweets with “wine” in it, including people I don’t follow, although again, using twitter’s words: “By default, the tweets you see on your home page are from sources of information that you have curated over time—in other words, the accounts you chose to follow. When you search, you’re asking for any tweets that contain the word or phrase you’re interested in right now.”

I then expended the keywords a bit: wholefood wine, I was thinking about what wine is on sale at my local wholefood store. There was no search results! See where I am going: twitter search is very early, it does not look for keyword match type, no ability for local search – just for the record. yes, if twitter search is perfectly done. I can totally imagine this twitter becoming the next Internet cash king like Google does. I can also imagine TEO/TEM. (vs. SEO/SEM). To get to where they need to be quickly, profitability wise, twitter might work with Google. Otherwise, it may take much longer.

I know, I know. Twitter confirmed paid account. But I don’t believe that is a sustainable way to be a fortune 500 company if twitter really think big. Look at flickr, they are nice, they were big. So what? Twitter should be much bigger than that. and I believe Search is one of the top ways to go.

So, to wrap it up, Looks like the new twitter search feature is mainly a design change, but it’s a significant change toward monetizing the most important real estate: the twitting page. (Not search.twitter.com)

Thoughts?
P.s. I believe I just invented terms “TEO” and “TEM” or “TSEO” or “TSEM”