This is beyond ridiculous. Real time search is something you care about a tiny, tiny fraction of a percent of the time. And when you do, Twitter is still pretty near worthless. You heard a plane crashed in the river, so you search Twitter, and see a bunch of posts like "OMG a plane crashed in a river, now I'm going to the gym." and maybe a picture of a submerged plane. Who cares?<p>You won't destroy Google by building a search service that does nothing but break news 5 minutes before CNN does.
"Dear Google: Please buy Twitter. Signed, a Twitter investor."<p>The idea that real-time search will be big is still interesting.<p>However, seeking a twitch-timescale update on everything is ultimately a bad habit, except among certain kinds of professional investors. Considering the author's example of a mysterious rumble in Fall's Church, Virginia: people don't benefit from the distraction of twitter-scale updates; the wiser strategy is to get one authoritative report when the story is settled. (The few genuine "holy crap do I need to do something?" situations are too rare to build a giant search business on.)
If real time information was such a big damn deal, Wikipedia wouldn't be the top hit for every other Google search. Honestly, CNN TV/.com/etc still wins for breaking news (they had more viewers than any of the OTA networks). So Twitter wins by five minutes. Seriously, who gives a damn? Just media navel-gazers.
While normal ads won't work on twitter, viral marketing will. So now, advertisers win by creating content people'll twit about. Perhaps even paying people to advertise to their friends. Shouldn't be hard to introduce with so many people looking for a source of income. Not sure I like where this'll go...
The closing of the article says it all... shame I read it all before getting to it:<p>"Disclosure. I am CEO of betaworks. betaworks is a Twitter shareholder. We are also a Tweetdeck shareholder. betaworks companies are listed on our web site."
Just posted this: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=473209" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=473209</a>.<p>Its funny how Fred Wilson and others linked to the original post without commenting on the fundamental flaws in the twitter-Google discussion.