Twitter In Search Engine Talks
According to a report by ChannelWeb, the hugely popular micro-blogging service Twitter may have finally found a way to monetize the countless messages, (known as tweets) that are sent daily by it’s users.
ChannelWeb has reported that that both Google and Microsoft are apparently engaged in high level negotiations with Twitter, to enable them to search their live tweet feeds on a real-time basis. And according to a Wall Street Journal blog post, Yahoo’s partnership with Microsoft could mean that they too could benefit from any agreement that is reached.
Twitter has been trying to get some commercial gain from their service for some time, and it may be that they are on the verge of succeeding.
Independent Search
Twitter has it’s own internal search engine, but it’s unlikely that they would be able to increase their search capability to make them competitive, even if that was what they wanted.
Although it’s possible that nothing will come of these talks, an agreement could have serious implications for both major search engine players to expand their search abilities. With an estimated 23.6 million visits per month, Twitter is one of the most popular, and utilised, sites on the internet.
And although much of the information sent via Twitter is fairly unimportant, users are also quick to tweet about important events, including breaking news, both political, environmental, and market based.
A Potential Advantage
Even the unimportant can be useful though, as online marketing, and its analysis, creeps ever further into our every day lives.
The ability to effectively search tweets real time could potentially convey advantages to marketers who use the internet extensively, whether to gather data on opinions or reactions to products or advertising campaigns.
It remains to be seen what, if anything, will come of this, but there is little doubt that many people would love to be able to leverage the Twitter data stream into competitive advantage for themselves.
It’s an open question as to whether marketers will gain any significant advantage from this social media marketing, but in the end, you can never have too much data.