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Google / Twitter Beef Reportedly Results In Cancellation Of Android Meeting

Remember that Twitter Google deal that the companies couldn’t get renewed? The one for real-time search, which made Google a lot better for real-time information? It doesn’t look like they...
Google / Twitter Beef Reportedly Results In Cancellation Of Android Meeting
Written by Chris Crum
  • Remember that Twitter Google deal that the companies couldn’t get renewed? The one for real-time search, which made Google a lot better for real-time information? It doesn’t look like they’re going to come to an agreement anytime soon.

    Google and Twitter are beefin’.

    In case you haven’t been keeping up, Twitter spoke out against Google’s “Search Plus Your World” features, announced earlier this month, which give Google+ a lot more visibility in search results. More on that here.

    Google responded, “We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.”

    Sarah Lacy of PandoDaily has an interesting report about how Google and Twitter were supposed to meet about Twitter and Android (which could have been very interesting, considering Apple’s increased Twitter integration with iOS 5). Lacy reports:

    A well-placed source tells us that Google’s Android team was supposed to meet with Twitter at CES about how to make Twitter work better on Android. Then, the Search Plus Your World controversy began. Eric Schmidt claimed that Google couldn’t index Twitter and Facebook properly because those companies don’t allow Twitter to access their data. Twitter openly refuted this: The reality is Google’s bots hit Twitter hundreds of millions of times per day, sending 1,500 queries per second. Google has those Tweets, whether Twitter likes it or not.

    The Google brain trust was so irritated with Twitter’s statements that the Android meeting was abruptly called off, according to a source with knowledge of the situation. There’s still no sign of the meeting being rescheduled.

    Clearly there is a great deal of bad blood between Google and Twitter, who called SPYW “bad for the Internet”.

    This bad blood doesn’t bode well for the return of Twitter to Google’s realtime search, though Google has indicated it would relaunch the feature in the future with Google+ content (and content from other sources). Unfortunately (for Google users) Twitter is still the best way to get realtime information about just about anything. Fortunately for Twitter users, this info is still easily obtainable with a simple Twitter search.

    The whole Android thing is interesting though. Lacy suggests that this could have a negative impact on Android’s user experience, benefiting the iPhone. I doubt we will see Twitter going to far as to pull their Android app for the market or anything. Even if they did, there would be plenty of third-party apps to step up to the plate.

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