Friday, January 27, 2012

Google Should Get The Twitter Firehose

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBaseAll tweets are public. On Facebook many things are private. But that is not at all true of Twitter. So it makes absolutely no philosophical sense for Twitter to not give Google access to all tweets.

Twitter fundamentally misunderstands real time. Real time is not only real time as it is happening now, today. Real time is also real time as it happened in real time two years ago, two months ago. And I want access to all my tweets.

Twitter Should Open Up Its API ---- To Google

If Google were to have access to all tweets, it would show them in the Google search results. Maybe Twitter should make available only tweets that are at least 50 hours old. That I can understand. Because you don't want people doing Google searches for real time results. For that they should go to Twitter. But for all the old tweets, Google is best positioned to serve them to us. I mean, Twitter is not even trying.

Giving Google that access will suddenly give Twitter all this amazing real estate on which to serve big display ads.


Enhanced by Zemanta

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Google has access to every public tweet that Twitter makes "indexable". That's why there are 65m results for "site:twitter.com".

By giving Google "free" access to the firehose would completely kill a major source of revenue for Twitter. A service that Microsoft and Yahoo both spend millions every year in hopes of one upping Google.

Maybe Google just had their head up their asses when they thought that Google+ would give them enough social data to not need the Twitter firehose.

Well we see how that played out.