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Will Twitter be a major search player?

February 19th, 2009 by derek

We have been having a very interesting internal debate lately about Twitter’s eventual business model(s).  There was an interesting post yesterday that spoke to the heart of our debate.  This post talks about Twitter challenging Google as a major player in the next generation of search.  Since I am the one writing this post, I get to offer my opinion first.  There are others on the Traackr team who disagree (quite passionately), but they will have to offer their opinions in the comments section :)

My opinion is that this post is on the money.  I have said for a while that from a user perspective, Twitter is a fun, social,  communication platform.  But from a business perspective, it’s a search platform.  There are many people that are already using Search.Twitter.com as their main search tool for all kinds of information on products, services, places to eat, people to meet, etc.  I haven’t gone completely to Twitter, yet, but I find myself searching Twitter about 10% of the time now.  That’s pretty significant.  One of the reasons I don’t use it more than that is that it isn’t that convenient.  But once they integrate search into my main Twitter interface, it will be.  And I’ll use it more and more.  And I don’t think I’m alone.

From my view, Twitter’s main value is in its searchable data.  And this is where they will eventually make their money (will they make enough to generate a $250MM valuation?  time will tell on that).

So, note to Twitter — Don’t charge corporate users — they will go away (or not sign up) and you will lose valuable content…which will lead to more searches…which will lead to more $$.  Maybe charge of API access — this will help you take advantage of the countless applications that are based on your content.  Either way, understand that search is where it’s at for you.

Note to Microsoft — why in the world would you mess with Yahoo?  Take a hard look at Twitter…

Now, I open the floor to the opposition…

DS

 

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 11:54 pm and is filed under MarCom 2.0, We Search, We Score, We Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://traackr.com pierreloic

    All right, I guess I’ll lead the other side of this argument. I’m a very big fan of Twitter and strongly believe they will find their way to revenue and profitability. But this won’t happen with Search.
    Two main reasons for this:
    1- Search is complex and costly – Twitter doesn’t have the resources to compete there.
    2- Search is based on indexing ubiquitous content. Twitter can’t even index its own content (if you want to find tweets, you’re already better off looking for them on Google than Twitter).
    Now, there is something to be said about Twitter searches as the emergence of a different type of searches, using users collective intelligence to find answers rather than the robustness and reliability of a Google search.
    But this is a different discussion altogether…

  • derek

    Hmmm…maybe there is some confusion. I’m not suggesting that Twitter is going to be a ubiquitous search company. I’m suggesting that (1) They will be the main search option for people searching for Tweets; and (2) This type of search will become their main source of revenue.

    Twitter Search will be a “closed” search system. It will only search Twitter content. And it will be powerful…

  • derek

    Oh, boy…another blogger in agreement with the original point!

    http://battellemedia.com/archives/004832.php

  • http://www.artiajans.net AJANS

    I’ve been thinking and talking to people about this for a couple weeks as well. I agree, I think that Twitter is becoming a mega hit on the size of YouTube.

    What folks don’t understand is that YouTube and Twitter are fundamental inventions, new forms and new mediums that are valued at a much higher price than just improvements to previous software.

    In terms of who needs to own Twitter, I think that MSFT and YHOO need it more than GOOG, because, yes, it would be nice for GOOG to have it, but it is still super strong without it.

    To me the question of how Twitter will be monetized, particularly with ads is still at large. Just like ads might not work on FB, they might not work on Twitter.

    Still, just because it has got so much momentum and is so cool and so innovative it is worth a huge amounts of $$ to GOOG or anyone else.