The popularity of microblogging and, in particular, of Twitter has spawned many websites that try to capitalise on the growing trend, making “Real Time Search” a “hot new thing”.
The popularity of microblogging and, in particular, of Twitter has spawned many websites that try to capitalise on the growing trend, making "Real Time Search" a "hot new thing". Tweefind, for example, lets you search tweets and orders the results by "user rank", whilst Twingly provides search for blogs and microblogs.
All of this microblogging activity has obviously gained the attention of the major search engines. In April, there were rumours that Google was in talks to buy Twitter, and in June Google Operating System blog reported that Google was working on a microblogging search engine. It is interesting to note that Google did own a microblogging service called Jaiku, which it bought in October 2007. In January 2009, Google announced that Jaiku would become open source and that Google would no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase.
Then, in early July, Bing announced that it would be bringing Twitter content to Bing results. Primarily, these results are from a group of "the more prominent and prolific twitterers". Later in the month, Bing came out with another announcement, stating that Microsoft, together with Twitter and Federated Media, were introducing a portal called BingTweets, which would combine Bing results and content from Twitter.
Just as a completely non scientific, non-exhaustive test, I thought I’d tweet and then see how quickly bingtweets, Twingly and Tweefind would pick it up. I tweeted "Whatever happened to Long Fin Killie http://bit.ly/XknzR by rights they should have been huge."
I was very impressed to find that Twingly, BingTweets and Tweefind all found my tweet almost instantaneously. Although, for some reason, Twingly had me posting "3 minutes ago" less than 1 minute after I’d tweeted.
Microblogging and real-time search are, I think, here to stay and will possibly be more important as time goes on.
Tags: microblogging, Microsoft, real-time search, twitter