Twitter-Mania
April 3, 2009
The banking industry may be near death, but the lads and lassies keep on trying. Kara Swisher’s views are fascinating and often informed. You can read “Sorry to Get You All A-Twitter, But Google Is Not in “Late-Stage Talks” to Acquire the Hot Microblogging Service” here.
The latest and greatest play is the pumping of Twitter. I have written about Google’s inability to make headway in the real time search sector. I compared this lack of agility to everything from arteriosclerosis to interest in solving the global energy crisis. On the other side of the argument is Microsoft, another outfit paralyzed in the real time search sector. What does an under employed venture centric deal maker do? My thought is to whip up a bidding war. A few billion sloshing around will help the trophy generation folks in the money business. I am sitting on the sidelines in this argument for three reasons:
- Real time search has no substantive history of earnings, which suggests more chit chat among the MBAs. Who wants to do a deal without being able to answer the question, “What’s the bottomline on revenue?”
- The sector itself is murky. Law enforcement and intelligence professionals understand the value of flowing comments anchored to a user. Other business sectors are not sure what value Tweets have.
- The idea of real time content flow is a powerful one. Many companies say their systems are real time. As a result, there is considerable confusion about the distinctiveness of the Twitter type of text streams.
This is an evolving story, and I think I will sit on the sidelines and watch the machinations of the MBAs.
Stephen Arnold, April 3, 2009
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One Response to “Twitter-Mania”
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It will be interesting to see how this one plays out.
I think real-time search will form a key growth area in search over the coming years. I also think it can be interpreted in many ways. Currently the focus seems to be on being able to see what people are blogging about as it happens.
How about this? What about providing users the ability to see in real-time what people are actually looking for? And beyond that enabling users to reply.
That is precisely what we are developing with YouPage.
To see YouPage is action use our link. To see what people are searching YouPage for right now click the “Real-Time Search” link.
I would be interested in your thoughts on this.