
Ann Smarty at ProductiveWise sizes up the various options for tapping into real-time search - Twitter, Facebook, Google and Friendfeed. Personally, I am finding Google's new search options to be outstanding - an addicting.

Ann Smarty at ProductiveWise sizes up the various options for tapping into real-time search - Twitter, Facebook, Google and Friendfeed. Personally, I am finding Google's new search options to be outstanding - an addicting.
Twitter is an English word -- that's significantly different. But the word doesn't mean anything specific, and the management of twitter is in fact ruining what "intellectual capital" that word used to add to twitter.com -- many sites have been run into the ground this way (so the twitter management's "epic fail" -- its "dropping the ball" -- is nothing new).
Facebook.com seems to be managed FAR BETTER than twitter.com (in case anyone feels they're competitors) -- but all 4 of the sites mentioned have very little or in fact no sense of community whatsoever. They are all brand name / mainstream media -- and therefore shouldn't be very interesting to advertisers seeking to reach targeted audiences (but that doesn't necessarily mean that many advertisers would refrain from wasting a lot of money advertising in these venues -- many advertisers may very well be just as clueless as most of the users of these services).
:) nmw
Actually, you wrote a post about that trick http://www.steverubel.com/google-real-time-search-bookmarklet :)
All of the interest in "social" is primarily a sign of DISINTEREST in Google -- in other words: it shows how BAD Google is -- what an epic failure at "organizing all the web's information" (which is, of course, a ludicrously conceited goal in the first place).
The main people who should be worried are: 1. people invested in Google and 2. advertisers who think that any of their ad spend will actually have a significant impact on the bottom line. I might also add that the users/consumers should be worried how badly they're being misinformed, but I guess that many of these people are so accustomed to being poorly informed by mass media that they probably wouldn't be terribly upset about it anyways. (sad but true?)
I believe in the near future, when some sort of integration between the FF and FB platforms, will offer a competitive position for FaceBook against Google.
As far as the necessity for "real-time" searches, I believe that by monitoring a particular topic or discussion of a brand might be helpful in a larger perspective, but responding to such information "real-time" can be, at best, reactionary. On the other hand, I suppose I can understand the value of more immediate changes in search rankings, brand buzz, and such for the SEO gurus. That, however, is a very different topic.