Twitter’s search is the future of twitter, but it’s not ready
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”
