Google's First Real Threat? Twitter. | Hacker News Reader

Google's First Real Threat? Twitter.

lewmoorman.com

34 pointsmcxx39 comments

Oh please, Twitter couldn't threaten Google if all the founders lives depended on it. The twitter hype is just silly, they haven't even figured out how to make money yet, c'mon.

haha, I read the headline and my first thought was "Twitter? Oh please..."

"HA!" - Edna Krabappel

That was my initial thought at the headline.

Google took quite a while to figure out how to make money too. But yeah, it's kind of silly to say Twitter is any threat.

Google had the significant advantage of starting when the internet was relatively small. They had fewer users and likely low bandwidth costs. Twitter doesn't have that advantage, if it takes twitter and identical amount of time to figure out how to make money as it did google, then Twitter could likely be in so much debt they go bankrupt.

They're taking equity financing, not debt. Equity doesn't have to be paid back (well, presumably the investors want dividends or an exit, but they can't force the company into bankruptcy if they don't get it).

If you figure 33 employees @ $200K/year, they're only burning $6-7M/year. With $55M in cash, that's like an 8 year runway. Granted, they're not going to stay at their current size forever, but they hopefully won't stay at their current (lack of) revenue forever either.

I sincerely doubt that Google fears Twitter, but twitter search can and does provide something very powerful that, at this point, Google does not. That "something" is real time info.

Some examples:

1. Some Saturday Night around midnight try searching Twitter for SNL. (You don't really have to search, it's usually a trending topic). You will instantly find out who the guest is, if there is anything particularly funny, if the monologue bombed, etc. Go ahead and say "SNL is never funny," but it is just an example of real time feedback. You can do the same thing during awards shows or sporting events.

2. Since silicon valley has a relatively high density of Twitter users, I will sometimes find myself doing a twitter search for the road I'm about to take if I'm concerned about traffic. Sure, I can see traffic on Google maps on my iPhone but it only covers freeways and is not as fast or granular as people complaining that they aren't moving for whatever reason at a paricular intersection.

3. Speaking of iPhones, Twitter search was AWESOME for figuring out where lines were long or short. On the days following the 3G launch, doing a search for 'iPhone line' would produce results like "About 200 people in iPhone line at Valley Fair - 10 minutes ago" or "iPhone line was only about 30 minutes in Palo Alto - 1 hour ago." Quickly getting a sense of the crowds before driving all over town is VERY useful.

Google, while definitely not threatened, has no way to provide me that kind of real time info, and until they do, Twitter has an important place in search.

Another example:

I checked my DVR for the latest Office 2 weeks ago. Nothing there. Was the problem the DVR or was there no new office?

Twitter search: "the office"

Results: "wtf -- no new office this week" and about 100 other similar messages.

I do things like this a few times a week now. Twitter Search is about as exciting as Web 2.0 companies get, imo.

The day twitter causes google execs to quake in their boots is the day that cows will fly and hell will freeze over.

Please. Twitter is large, but still a niche. I've played around with it, it's nice but it is also something that I can easily live without.

The twitter crowd (as well as most other social networking sites and their denizens) remind me of locusts, they swarm in untold hordes from one 'hot' new thing to another, initially a few harbingers, then the main crowd until the fascination with the new medium is over and then it goes away again.

Right now twitter is roughly 1% the size of google, and plenty of people have already tried it and have moved on. Google is the #2 website in the world, with above it only yahoo.com, the example given (the new audi) is maybe relevant to the 'buzz' scene (which really is what twitter is all about) but the rest of us may not care that much.

Blogging is only a small fraction of search, you have to do everything well, if not then you're a niche player, and niche players are not a threat.

Is it really a whole percent the size? That seems large to me.

Roughly, twitter about 0.3% of the internet at large google about 30%.

Even if they're both off by 50% that still makes twitter an impressive achievement.

On a side note, I find it incredible that yahoo still is as big as it is, I never expected them to hold out as long as they did at the top spot. I really wonder what the stickyness there is. Somewhere in mid december or so I think google overtook yahoo as the #1 site.

It's because people use Yahoo for a ton of stuff. I still use Yahoo Answers when I have no other place to ask a question. My roommate uses Yahoo sports. Some browsers still default to Yahoo. It's huge: its array of services make Google look minimal.

0.3% is pretty impressive, absolutely. It's still not the revolution people've been calling it, and I'd be willing to bet it never goes truly mainstream. I don't think it can while Facebook maintains its grip on college-age kids.

I see twitter as the 'facebook' of the linked-in and xing crowd, not sure if that makes sense that way to others though.

The reason why is that it's the same people that seem to be sending out invites on all those networks, but somehow it is disjoint from facebook which I think pulled a lot of people in the myspace (formerly the same crowd that was on geocities) towards it as well as a whole slew of people that have just 'established' themselves on the web.

It would be very interesting to see how much overlap there is between those sites.

Yeah, I'd be curious to see that too. The only problem with that is that Facebook's popular because it's a sort of all-in-one. If you don't care about your online presence, it does everything in one place. Twitter handles a much more limited subset of those things.

Of course cows can fly. It's pigs that have a problem getting off the ground!

There's no way that Google is "threatened" by Twitter search. Google's search dominance is not maintained by providing the best car reviews or up-to-the-minute news. I'm not going to go to Twitter to search for research papers, or obscure little facts, or tech help on some issue I'm having with my OS. I can't use Twitter search to find all of the news.yc threads regarding Twitter, but Google can: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+t...

Additionally, for a lot of people, Google's not just a source of information, but a gateway to the Internet. Twitter, I think, can't do that. I think that this whole real-time news & Twitter search thing might prove interesting and fruitful, but it's not a threat to Google.

Here's a recent twitter story for me: A few weeks ago, I was sitting in my living room, and I heard a bunch of emergency vehicles. I went to the local live 911 site and saw that there was a large heavy rescue response at the interchange between two major highways; 18 vehicles. My wife was searching local news sites; nothing. I went to twitter search, searched for one of the highways, and immediately found someone who was twittering from the scene, and taking photos. That's pretty powerful stuff, but at present, also probably rare. But as more people start to pulse more immediate information into channels like this, along with metadata (as automatic as possible, like location) this dynamic will become more common. And potentially abused.

Agreed. This is the sort of stuff that Twitter is great for and I suspect that someone smart will find a way to use it as the vehicle for citizen news reporting. But it's niche, like a lot of folks are saying and even then, the kinks would be plentiful and I'm not sure that it'd be particularly useful during "dead times" and it'd be hard to sift through what's important except in bigger places or centered around certain niches.

The technology itself is useful, just a question of whether it's something someone would pay for and I'd say no in most cases.

Here are some searches that are better for me on search.twitter than on google:

1) My name and company name

2) When I'm at a party and I want to find the after party

3) I'm moderating a panel and I want to see what people think

4) When I'm NOT at a conference and I want to read what I'm missing

5) When the building shakes, I search "earthquake" to see if what's going on.

6) When I want to see if others are also having trouble with an iPhone app

7) When I want to see if a company responds to its customer service issues

When looking for info on Breaking News

Sure. Just wait until Twitter becomes worth gaming, and see if its "Human Powered Search" is still good for anything. If a large enough number of people ever start using Twitter to research products, it'll be overrun with spam, and it will be much harder to combat than for Google.

One way to mitigate this would be to allow users to limit search to who they following, or some circle around them.

This might even be the basis of a business model, if Twitter gets its micropayments story worked out: let folks who are good at finding good content charge other users to follow them (something small, 10c a month or whatever). People might pay if they felt like they were avoiding spam and getting good, searchable content.

* If a large enough number of people ever start using Twitter ... it'll be overrun with spam*

Too late. Whenever I've mentioned a single, specific technology product or stack, it has taken less than 3 hours until some totally random stranger with nothing but "related" spam updates adds me, obviously expecting me to instinctively add them back, like I'm some kind of follower-count whore.

Twitter is being heavily spammed and gamed already.

That's an interesting angle and I always thought, why is there a search.twitter.com and not just a little input at the top every page on twitter.com.

I suspect that that design decision is failwhale repellent. The only problem with a search box on every page is that people would probably use it.

IIRC, twitter not too long ago acquired a 3rd party company who offered better searching. It may be an integration issue as well.

People love to exaggerate. It's an interesting idea but, no, it's not happening.

his key point is that "twitter knows which of our blog post was most popular" - ...

So does Google (links coming in, perhaps even twitter links) also they use user click data; Google knows son, Google knows.

Naturally, the blogosphere is seeing things through a blogo-spherical lense, and to them it's huge, no point in debating that.

But the world is a lot larger than blogs and I think that's why they miss the point entirely. 99% of all the blogs out there is rubbish anyway, or at a minimum has very limited applicability. A 'rating' system for blogs would actually be a useful thing but I see it very much as a niche application.

And don't forget that the rss stats from the google bought 'feedburner' also tell you a lot about blog popularity without having access to 'twitters goldmine', same goes for analytics. Google has a lot more when it comes to datasources than just the search box.

My prediction for 2009 is that Google will buy Twitter.

And then they'll nuke it like Dodgeball and Jaiku?

Maybe the article has a point...

Or it will thrive like Blogger, which given the players involved is a much more apt comparison.

Not too long ago I discovered http://www.twitscoop.com/, and I realized that there's no better place to go if I ever want to partake in the droning about pop-culture 'now'.

Also, news summaries (i.e. one liners) seem to be better done when they're done by people rather than search engines/newspapers.

Bang on. If they can nail natural language search, Twitter will beat Google hands down.

I don't agree that Twitter is a threat to Google, but I can see it gaining a foothold as a place for consumers, for example, to get direct user data on a product or company that is not possible through product reviews.

Twitter is susceptible to spam now, and may be always, so the idea that it is better because you can get product reviews from real people is a bit silly. Presently there is no way to tell a bot account from a human.

That's really funny how the author takes the example of audi q5 and compares it to Google results.

Hoover's First Real Threat? Shamwow.

Twitter is just a well-designed little brand. It cannot be compared to Google, but it can teach us what google missed. Twitter is a good example how name + usability + simple design works together. Same ideas works for Facebook - design and usability and less ads is why they outperform myspace. It seems like google cannot create entertainment services. They made almost perfect source code hosting, and their mail and reader are simple and usable, unlike stuffed with ads yahoo's mail, or that mess myspace. If you're trying to invite people to some service "just for fun" it must be simple, stupid and usable, with few ads. Like iPhone =)

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