Google Next Victim Of Creative Destruction? | Hacker News Reader

Google Next Victim Of Creative Destruction?

alleyinsider.com

18 pointsnickb15 comments

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?

You won't destroy Google by building a search service that does nothing but break news 5 minutes before CNN does.

The killer app for real time search seems to be in figuring out whether this week's Heroes episode is worth watching.

I think

washeroesgoodthisweek.com

is still open. Sadly, I think you can get the job done with one static HTML page these days, and it does not include <h1>YES</h1> in it.

Edit: My little brother remarked to me, regarding "What GPS tracking unit?": "It seems like there is only one good writer on Heroes, and his contract dictates that he only be told to work on scenes between Hiro and Ando."

Maybe people will wake up and realise that real time doesn't actually matter; you can easily keep up to date polling 1-2x per month if you really wanted to.

It's not like anything truly vanguard happens more than a few times per year in most industries. And it's not twitter or bloggers that do it. Real innovation happens so infrequently that it's pretty easy to keep up if you have a system.

Unfortunately most young programmers I talk to don't even read papers [where the real action happens]!! They read blogs & twitter. Perhaps they don't realize that this IS science, and the plural of anecdotes on twitter et al do not make data.

"Dear Google: Please buy Twitter. Signed, a Twitter investor."

The idea that real-time search will be big is still interesting.

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.)

Although using Twitter for real-time emergency response at a governmental or NGO level sounds quite interesting.

If by interesting you mean the twitter 'Fail Whale' + FEMA, then yes, that would be...interesting.

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...

Actually, there already is a service which connects advertisers with Twitter users for paid advertising, but I can't remember the name of it for the life of me.

Fortunately, it hasn't caught on. There isn't much incentive to sign up; advertising makes you look like a tool, the money available is bound to be small, Twitter in general doesn't incur overhead, and people mostly use Twitter for fun.

Perhaps Twitter make it against the TOS, but even that seems overkill. The "viral" nature of Twitter should keep the negative effects of advertising to a minimum.

One of the ways I wouldn't mind advertising in Twitter is if I could get a compendium of Tweets emailed to me by Twitter every X hours - they could just put traditional banner advertising in each email as a sponsor link.

One of the things I like about twitter is the short form blogging. One of the things I don't like is having a twitter client distract me every few minutes (so I don't use one) or if I use the site instead, having to flip through a couple of pages of noise to find the little gems contained within.

I think a compendium of tweets would compile these two aspects of twitter, yet also give twitter the ability to make revenue off my attention.

my 2 cents.

The closing of the article says it all... shame I read it all before getting to it:

"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: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=473209.

Its funny how Fred Wilson and others linked to the original post without commenting on the fundamental flaws in the twitter-Google discussion.

Google has not really cracked realtime search yet. Could this be the kink in their armor?

How haven't they? You can search Google News which searches all of the top stories from top news sites. Use Google Blog Search to do the same. Sure they can't search Facebook(unless allowed) or some of twitter but that isn't a kink in their armor.

Maybe our definitions of realtime search are different; what is yours?

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