Forum Moderators: rogerd
Twitter Search, which currently searches only the text of Twitter posts, will soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages.This will make Twitter Search a much more complete index of what's happening in real time on the Web, and make it an even more credible competitor to Google Search for people who are looking for very timely content.
Twitter Search will also get a reputation ranking system soon, Jayaram told me. When you do a search on a "trending" topic (a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar), Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank search results in part based on that.
I assume we'll see a new onslaught of tools to get 20,000 followers in a few days. Ugh.
Yes, nevertheless could be a great mktg tool!
My results:
1. The page load time just to open the search page was awful. Took about 8 seconds. Not sure why. Other sites load instantly, so not my ISP.
2. Since I'm currently thinking about buying some new appliances, thought I would see what folks were saying real time about GE Profile stuff. Results were not very helpful. One spammy "slick deal" link, 2 apartment rental classifieds (?) that apparently have GE appliances, and one guy who was waiting for the GE repair man from 10 days ago.
I'm guessing this is beta... seems to have a ways to go... that or they just don't have that much data yet...
I'm sure Ms. Spears wouldn't be a celebrity if she wasn't wise and knowledgeable, hence making her opinions more valuable. Right? ;)
Unfortunately, this reminds me a lot of the early days of "link popularity" and I expect it to be exploited by spammers and promoters.
The next step would be to value followers much as PageRank does - if Oprah follows you (with 800K followers and only following a few) that would be a bigger boost for you than if I followed you (with far fewer followers and following a nearly equal number).
Let the gaming begin... :(
Search for "GE Stove", "GE stove reviews"
Brittany - Just puked on my new stainless GE stove while reviewing a new video proposal and chugging a box of wine.
GE Appliance Fan - Just posted a full review of the new GE stainless stove model ABCDEFG. Love it!
x 1,000,000+ tweets
How are they going to sort through that? Maybe in 10 years with the Google PhD algo staff but not on a shoestring with no monetization (or revenue) method.
I noticed three major players from Digg have added twitter profiles and they've signed up to every "follow me and i'll follow you" network they could... is this what one needs to have influence on Twitter?
If twitter succeeds in gaining popularity with their search engine and the system isn't ready webmasters not prepared to fight spam with spam might be seeing their share of traffic fall... and that's not good for the net as a whole.
edit: I really hate sounding so negative too but the follow me and i'll follow you mentality is everywhere on Twitter. Users seem to think that sheer volume of followers is important somehow. Yuck!
[edited by: JS_Harris at 4:26 am (utc) on May 8, 2009]
Great. I'm number one for followers in my niche!
And half of them are bots ;)
Seriously, last week I blocked just under half my "followers" who were so obviously bot-created - half!
Bots spamming bots - s'funny.
Only half? I've blocked more than 95% so far this month.
Steve
Brittany - Just puked on my new stainless GE stove while reviewing a new video proposal and chugging a box of wine.
Great example. And this is exactly what will render twitter absolutely useless if they use numbers of followers to establish authority for tweets.
I wonder if an alternative might be to establish a running catalog of every tweet a person has made and then compare the context of a newly made tweet to the historical word usage of past tweets. That would establish "relevance". If a tweeter constantly talks about vitamins from tweet one to tweet 1000, then twitter would know that the individual is all about vitamins. But what about authority for the tweets? Just because someone talks about something 24/7 doesn't make their tweets authoritative. Does twitter then base it on "retweets". Retweeting is already completely corrupt and social media clowns are setting up tons of profiles to retweet certain topics to dominate for them in twitter search. Retweeting, therefore, should not be a basis for authority. What then, do they rely on the tweeter's connection to an outside side? Say, if you have a site listed in your twitter profile and that site is highly ranked in google, you give the tweeter's tweets a boost if they happen to be on-topic with the site listed in the profile? That would mean twitter authority would be dependent on google. How else to do it?
Users seem to think that sheer volume of followers is important somehow. Yuck!
Yeh. Like do people really think that all their followers read all their tweets.
They probably all have tweet deck or some such thing and really only follow a few favorite people.
They will have to have a lot better system to make a search worthwhile. I looked at #American Idol last night because we had missed part of the show. Worthless.
