Only When the Words Outdo the Silence

It’s time to take the internet seriously say’s Edge.org.  I’ll pose the idea on why you should take the internet seriously, the block of text lead by #., and you preface it with questions it might answer – Go!

(Links in this section of the post are dedicated to my previous post)

What’s the next step in the evolution of search engines?  Google personalized search?

What hangs on the technology tree…?

5. Consider Web search, for example. Modern search engines combine the functions of libraries and business directories on a global scale, in a flash: a lightning bolt of brilliant engineering. These search engines are indispensable — just like word processors. But they solve an easy problem. It has always been harder to find the right person than the right fact. Human experience and expertise are the most valuable resources on the Internet — if we could find them. Using a search engine to find (or be found by) the right person is a harder, more subtle problem than ordinary Internet search. Small pieces of the problem have been attacked; in the future we will solve this hard problem in general, instead of being satisfied with windfalls and the lowest-hanging fruit on the technology tree.

Why should my company blog?

How do you change stained glass…?

13. The traditional web site is static, but the Internet specializes in flowing, changing information. The “velocity of information” is important — not just the facts but their rate and direction of flow. Today’s typical website is like a stained glass window, many small panels leaded together. There is no good way to change stained glass, and no one expects it to change. So it’s not surprising that the Internet is now being overtaken by a different kind of cyberstructure

How does social and search dance?

How does the future flow…?

15. Every month, more and more information surges through the Cybersphere in lifestreams — some called blogs, “feeds,” “activity streams,” “event streams,” Twitter streams. All these streams are specialized examples of the cyberstructure we called a lifestream in the mid-1990s: a stream made of all sorts of digital documents, arranged by time of creation or arrival, changing in realtime; a stream you can focus and thus turn into a different stream; a stream with a past, present and future. The future flows through the present into the past at the speed of time

Why social media?

Wouldn’t a stream melt snow…?

17. There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it’s obvious how to blend two streams. You simply shuffle them together like two decks of cards, maintaining time-order — putting the earlier document first. Blending is important because we must be able to add and subtract in the Cybersphere. We add streams together by blending them. Because it’s easy to blend any group of streams, it’s easy to integrate stream-structured sites so we can treat the group as a unit, not as many separate points of activity; and integration is important to solving the information overload problem. We subtract streams by searching or focusing. Searching a stream for “snow” means that I subtract every stream-element that doesn’t deal with snow. Subtracting the “not snow” stream from the mainstream yields a “snow” stream. Blending streams and searching them are the addition and subtraction of the new Cybersphere.

Well, after hearing about this development – both rumors way back when and current articles – I’ve finally seen Twitter (real time) results appear in Google.  Ironically, they appear when I search for “Twitter results in Google” – ha!  Have a look:

Written on April 8, 2009

It took me awhile to join the Twitter wagon.  I signed up about a year ago, tweeted that same day and then let my account sit for three months.  Who wants to hear about me cutting my fingernails, I thought.  No one.  Life can be quite banal.  No, scratch that.  Life is banal (it’s also many other exciting things, so no existential hand clapping).  Cutting your fingernails is banal.  Boring.  It’s meant to be experienced by you alone.  Again, no tweet needed to inform the world of my clicking and snipping.  Then, about three months later, I sent out an email to the SEO team asking if anyone knew of a program for such-and-such task.  I received one reply; it was an answer,  so the part where most of my teammates ignored me was okay.  With the answer came a post script, “This is the sort of question Twitter is good for; you should check it out more.”   Interesting.  Twitter as a search engine.

Fast forward to last week.  By now, I’ve fooled around 90 people into following me on Twitter.  I follow approximately 80.  By now, I’ve mastered the art of including @ replies anywhere within a tweet.  I use is.gd, budurl and tinyurl simply because I can – why limit yourself?  I follow hilariously pointless accounts like AutomatedHouse and enjoy The Odyssey immensely.  By now, I make sure the number of characters I use in a tweet allows space for people to retweet my message (talk about thinking what you have to say is interesting…sheesh).  Basically, I’m in it.  I understand the ecosystem.  I have enough followers to ask Twitter a question I cannot ask Google, Yahoo or MSN.

While reading a blog I come across the interesting picture at the top of this post.  Didn’t know the name of the painting and didn’t know who painted it.  In a situation like this, Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, Mahalo and every other search engine out there wouldn’t be able to tell me the name of the painting and who painted it.  I even right clicked on the image, selected Copy Image URL and pasted it into my address bar hoping the person who put it on the internet named the file the painting or painter’s name.  No dice – http://www.hegel-system.de/de/gif/Gruen.jpg didn’t tell me what I needed to know (see, tag everything on your site properly; it enhances usability, user experience, findability).  If you search for [gruen] on Google you get to learn about the Gruen Watch Company or Sara Gruen, both interesting I’m sure (side note: if you do a Google image search for [gruen] you can find the answer to this question, but we’re not all that internet savvy, now are we…?).

So, I head to Twitter.  I tweet, “does anyone who know painted this? *url inserted here*?”  Within 5 minutes – no it’s not a microwave – I get two replies, “isn’t that hieronymous bosch?” and “looks like Bosch to me too.”  The plot thickened when I received a reply that read, “Matthias Grünewald 1515 “The Temptation of St. Anthony”…different from Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych version a decade earlier.”  The point, of course, is that I used Twitter as a search engine.  I couldn’t upload the image to Google for the answer.  I didn’t want to instant message each person on my AIM account because that’d be annoying and it only contains co-workers, so the likelihood someone knew the answer was low (you want high conversions, right?).

This is what Twitter has become, a real-time search engine.  Of course, there are still people who tweet about the banal things in life, and that’s okay, do you as they say, but there are also people out there that use Twitter to provide information to followers, links about search marketing or the hunger issue in your town.  Importantly, there are millions of people using Twitter and some are potentially talking about your product, service or your company.

From a broader perspective, Twitter is not the end-all-be-all social medial platform and will never hold that crown – no platform will hold that crown.  The internet is a rapidly changing environment and the crowd moves from one platform to the next.  As a business, you need to follow the crowd.  Will the crowd always move to a platform that is easily trackable and readily monetized?  Of course not.  But, in the age of the internet, it’s about the crowd.  It’s not about the business.  My favorite Seth Godin line, and one I perhaps refer to too often, goes something like this: the internet was not created by business people and does not exist to make you money – it’s not how does it help me?  It’s, “how are people using the internet and how do I help them achieve their goals?”  Taking that same spirit, if I had to create a social media strategy in one sentence, it would be “follow the crowd.”

UPDATE:

Twitter recently struck deals with the search engines that will further incorporate tweets into the search results pages.  Google had already been pulling status updates from Twitter and returning them for people queries – for example, I check my name on Google often because I use it as a sort of testing ground for how things rank and have seen my updates in Twitter for months.  However, this deal could signal the beginning of the search engines looking to these updates as more of a signal in determining how relevant a page/person is to a query.  Even with the links on Twitter nofollowed, it would be entirely antithetical to this deal if tweets didn’t score as a relevancy signal – even if it’s blunt at this point in time.