The tweet is the query. From Ad Age, which penned a good piece on the promise of Twitter search:
In the future, searches won’t only query what’s being said at the moment, but will go out to the Twitter audience in the form of a question, like a faster and less-filtered Yahoo Answers or Wiki Answers. Users would be able to tap the collective knowledge of the 6 million or so members of the Twitterverse.
“You put a question out to the global mind, and it comes back,” Mr. Chaffee explained. “Millions of people are contributing to the knowledge base. The engine is alive. You get feedback in real time from people, not just documents.”
I am worried that there is some distortion in this idea. I have nearly 3000 followers and if I ask a question, I’ll get a trickle if any responses but some service layered on top may help make this a reality.
What is also promising is the impending revelation (previewed by Skittles) that content is already present around innumerable topics inside the global twitterstream that will appear as content and community building blocks all over the Web.
I’m not so sure I’d trust the accuracy of the response from “the collective knowledge of the 6 million or so members of the Twitterverse.”
The Twitterverse obviously needs some seasoning as a medium first. It’s hard to imagine the current product architecture of Twitter as some kind of reliable information service. I’m also unimpressed with the quality of queriable information — the abbreviations, the creative spelling — on Twitter.
Given Twitter’s strengths as a platform, I can’t imagine it as a knowledge base for anything other than “what is happening with ___ right now?”
I agree with the others. To suggest that Twitter will replace qualified ratings/reviews sites I think is overstated. As noted by Narendra, followers don’t mean squat if they don’t participate. But even with 3000 followers on a fraction will poses the knowledge required to answer the question. Of those qualified only a portion of them will provide a response and of the responses you will need to determine the correct answer.
One downside here is that if you become reliant on the Twitter community you can end up with bad answers. Right now, today, this may not be an issue, but as more and more less astute people join Twitter the value of the collective knowledge goes down. How is it that urban legends and Nigerian money scams are still in place today given the extensive list of sites available to combat the issue.
People don’t want to do research.
One thing that it will revolutionize is the further commercialization of search. Businesses will drool over serving up real time ads that consumers have virtually opted into.
You don’t really believe this, do you?
Until you understand it, it will seem a useless waste of time, once you learn to use it (and the whole world is learning) it will rock your world.
So some people don’t like their world rocked, we’ll miss them.
If Malcom Gladwell’s Tipping Point ever applied to anything, early 2009 will go down in history as the tweeting point.