earthshaking

[Twitter's new VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram] told of being in the Twitter offices in San Francisco on March 30, when the Twitter engineers noticed that the word "earthquake" had suddenly started trending up. They didn't know where the earthquake was. Several seconds later, their building started to shake.

The earthquake had been in Morgan Hill, 60 miles south of San Francisco, and the tweets about the shaker reached the office faster than the seismic waves themselves.

Rafe Needleman writing in Cool changes coming to Twitter Search.

Those cool changes include indexing the content behind links that are tweeted and ranking search results according to a reputation ranking.

Stating the obvious: Once Twitter has nailed search they're halfway to monetizing their business model -- and seriously competing with engines like Google. Twitter has an advantage that Google doesn't have[1]: homophilious network neighbors, which research has shown to be a powerful conduit for influencing others and for identifying affinities that don't materialize via traditional demographic profiling.

With the introduction of more powerful and reliable search capabilities Twitter could become a serious contender to Google in the search space.


[1] Worth noting that Google has attempted to accomplish something along the same lines by introducing the ability to tether an individual profile with search history (even more so now that they've introduced profile pages) and by letting folks score and record the importance of their search results.

search engine optimization as a contact sport

Billed as the "world's most prestigious SEO contest" (I suspect it may be the world's ONLY SEO contest), a marketing agency out of Sweden is running a competition to see who can score the highest search engine rank (known as SER to folks who care about these things -- and yes, full disclosure: I am one of those people) on the selected phrase: "globalwarming awareness2007".

The winner will be the domain that ranks highest across all the major search engines when the keyword phrase is queried on May 1st. Only domains registered after January 15th of this year qualify. Google SER will break any tie that might present itself.

It's not clear to me what prize will be awarded to the winner -- the glory of being able to claim that they've won the world's most prestigious only SEO contest?

Oh wait -- forgive me -- there are prizes. Big prizes.

The contest sponsors are quick to point out that the keyword phrase "globalwarming awareness2007",was selected for its virtue. But I've gotta wonder: how virtuous is it to persuade folks to create content designed to jockey for top spots across the major search engines -- when that content will be abandoned after May 1st? Online content at its best is fresh and relevant -- junk at the top of the pile does nobody any good.

Call me old fashioned: but I think content creators have a social responsibility to create content that's worth something -- for everyone. Particularly the folks who are searching it out.

There's a group on Flickr called "tag whores" where folks post images with extending tagging -- usually whole phrases and sentences that act as extended captions. They're fun to read, and there are a few masters out there who tell some great stories that way (and admittedly I'm not blame-free from adding "tag spam" of my own) -- but the metadata-dominatrix in me gets queasy when I see folks messing with their metadata like that.

All the messy search results. All the lost searchers.

But I suppose it all evens out in the end. The exoskeleton of metadata that is tagging just becomes a little bit messier than anticipated -- the story just gets a little bit more complex.