Guy Posts

My twitter usage has evolved. My first tweet simply read, “laying in bed” and since then I’ve used twitter to share and discover news articles, videos, and thought provoking ideas. Furthermore, as my tweet stats indicate, my participation was light at first—even non-existant for two months—and has since picked up dramatically.

Just as my interaction with twitter will continue to evolve, so too will twitter as a service. In the fall of 2008, I put some serious thought into the merits, uses, and (as the academics would say) “utility” of twitter. The result was a sprawling, long-winded diatribe in a file that I appropriately named “twitter_thoughts.txt”. In it, I present twitter as an emerging technology, not unlike the internet back when AOL charged us by the minute. Twitter, I maintained then and still maintain now, represents a primordial sea of information waiting to be collected, organized, and made consumer friendly.

Addressing the primordial sea of opportunity is where twitter is headed. And they’ll do it by perfecting twitter search. If acquiring Summize was any indication, the folks at Twitter understand that search is the chest, key, and treasure when it comes to internet productivity.

A targeted search query—a Google search—is largely based on culling down to exactly what you want. The problem is we never really know exactly what we’re looking for. The power of twitter ultimately lies in real-time and what I call “human associative” search and it works in two ways. The first way mimics the search query technique whereby you input term(s) that are then matched in the global database of public tweets. This is a good way to find a broad overview of a topic in which you know very little, but want to be brought up to speed in a timely fashion. The second type is the real-time, crowd sourced search. This is still an emerging dynamic within twitter and with time, will challenge the dominance of Google’s search model.

I’ve experienced the power of the first type of search, the queried human associative search. I was in Tampa last summer and early projections had Hurricane Fay rolling right through where I was. I had never been in or around a Hurricane before, and I just wanted to know how to prepare, what to expect, etc. Hurricane Fay was a trending topic in twitter search, so I clicked on it and up came a page of “tweets” from users… one commenting that Miami-Dade county schools were closed due to Fay, another linking to the latest projections, another noting they were picking up water from Sam’s Club, while others talked of stocking up on beer for a hurricane party. Alas, I actually did learn a lot of good stuff, and fast. Schools were closing, the latest projections had the hurricane veering off track, some people stock up on water in preparation, while others load up on the Corona and have at it. I’ve since used this method to check a wide array of breaking news topics.

The second type of search, real-time, crowd sourced search, resembles Ask Jeeves. With Ask Jeeves, the user asks a real question, and Jeeves, the all-knowing internet butler/algorithm responds to the question with links and answers to it. Twitter one-ups Ask Jeeves because it’s really an “Ask Everyone” platform. When you pose a question on twitter, it gets sent to your cache of followers and those monitoring words that happen to be in your tweet. As a result, it’s possible to get pertinent responses quickly from people that can and are looking to help you. Rather than passively searching out information, the question you ask elicits responses from other people in twitteronia. This sort of technology has Reid Hoffman excited for the future of large scale social networks in that they allow one to gather a greater amount of targeted, actionable information than at any time in history. He explains a similar experience he had using LinkedIn…

REID HOFFMAN: So for example, you know, I posted a question on LinkedIn about where should we locate our European headquarters, right? And within a day, I had about 20 answers, which included some components of information that actually hadn’t occurred to me. Like, so it hadn’t occurred to me multiple direct flights to the location would actually be a really useful way of coordinating…

CHARLIE ROSE: Why wouldn’t that occur to you?

REID HOFFMAN: Well, because what I was thinking was, where is the tech talent, how much does it cost, what does the taxation look like. There was a list of things that I was actually already thinking about, but I hadn’t gotten to down to the specific logistics of coordination.

CHARLIE ROSE: Right, of transportation.

REID HOFFMAN: Yes, exactly where it’s at. OK, well, if you actually have two headquarters, you need to be able to sometimes travel very easily and fluently.

CHARLIE ROSE: So somebody on the network said…

REID HOFFMAN: Said, hey, you know, you should actually consider only these kind of cities where you actually have multiple direct flights, because when we’ve done this before, it’s been challenging in this way. And I was like, oh, obvious, right. And you know, part of what happened is I then followed up with that person, because they wrote something that was useful, and you can see their name in the bio. And I said, hey, what else did you learn? Is there anything else I should pay attention to when I’m doing this? And that’s getting the information that helps you solve a task.

Solving a task. This is what it’s all about. Twitter has the sea of information and an active network of users. Evan Williams, CEO and co-founder of Twitter notes that unforeseen evolutions have driven Twitter forward, “I’ve learned to follow the hunch, but never assume where it will go.” My personal hunch is they’re going after the search market. And if they do so in an organized, intuitive, and productive manner, Google will need to evolve or face extinction.