The twitter effect

Wed, Mar 18, 2009

I am amazed how twitter has grown, but not surprised when you think about what it’s potential could be based upon their simple idea! Twitter could be a game changer as far as I am concerned. They describe twitter as a realtime search engine - this to me was an ‘A HA’ moment when I first read it referenced this way. I realized how this could impact Google; Google is looking a little behind the times - did I just say that? Ha.

I do believe twitter could be a paradigm shift in the search engine/advertising arena. Below I have listed links to companies that have been created because of twitter along with a video from the founder, a great post about twitter, and the best twitter app out so far.

1. This is a job-related link where you can post jobs: http://www.twithire.com

2. I find this twitter for conferences interesting: Rate My Talk is a service that allows conference attendees to provide immediate feedback on a conference via Twitter or through our website. http://ratemytalk.com/

3. This post is from Chris Brogan’s blog site: 50 ideas on using twitter for business

4. TwitPic lets you share photos on twitter: http://twitpic.com/

5. Twitter in plain english from commoncraft.com: http://www.commoncraft.com/store-item/twitter

6. TwitterGadget is a clean, robust, web 2.0 style client for twitter.com, designed to eliminate the need to install third-party applications to monitor and submit status updates to Twitter via your Google homepage: http://www.twittergadget.com/

7. Twitter marketing case studies (they have quite a few here to read ): ttp://twittermarketingcasestudies.blogspot.com/2008/10/add-your-twitter-case-studies-on-this.html

8. Hashtags provide analytic reports and indexing features to allow users to track what’s happening now: http://hashtags.org

9 http://www.twilert.com/ I love this program. It is similar to Google alerts, where you put in a word or phrase and it will let you know when someone is tweating about it. Also great for reputation management online.

10.http://cursebird.com is a realtime feed of people cursing on twitter, lol.

11.http://sxoop.com/twitter/mosaic.pl lets you create a twitter mosaic of your followers or friends. You can than cut and paste the code on your blog or site.

12.http://tweetstats.com Graph your twitter stats.

13. http://tweepsearch.com twitter search engine

14.http://www.twibs.com browse 6,591 twitter businesses on twibs.com

15. http://twitturly.com/ they track and rank what URLs people are talking about on Twitter.

16. http://www.twply.com Have your @replies forwarded to Inbox

17. http://tweetburner.com/ Tracking the links you share

Twitter Founder Evan Williams at TED 09

Excerpt from a great article written by Erick Schonfeld, co-editor of techcrunch.com on February 15, 2009:

Mining The Thought Stream click here to read entire article

In fact, the crude beginnings of this “now” search engine already exists. It is called Twitter, and it is a big reason why new investors poured another $35 million into the two-year-old startup on Friday. Twitter is not the only company trying to solve this problem. Facebook, FriendFeed, and even Google are trying to crack it, but Twitter has a decided advantage in that it is capturing the vast majority of the real-time thought stream on the Web (because more people enter their thoughts directly into Twitter’s database than any other, and are doing so at an increasing rate).

imagine you are in line waiting for coffee and you hear people chattering about a plane landing on the Hudson. You go back to your desk and search Google for plane on the Hudson — today — weeks after the event, Google is replete with results — but the DAY of the incident there was nothing on the topic to be found on Google. Yet at http://search.twitter.com the conversations are right there in front of you. The same holds for any topical issues — lipstick on pig? — for real time questions, real time branding analysis, tracking a new product launch — on pretty much any subject if you want to know whats happening now, search.twitter.com will come up with a superior result set.

. . . How is real time search different? History isn’t that relevant — relevancy is driven mostly by time. . . . This reformulation of search as navigation is, I think, a step into a very new and different future. Google.com has suddenly become the source for pages — not conversations, not the real time web. What comes next? I think context is the next hurdle. Social context and page based context. . . . Twitter search today is crude — but so was Google.com once upon a not so long time ago.