So, lets take a moment to look at this thing a little bit before we get too carried away. (Anybody remember ‘RSS Feeds are going to kill email’?  OK… and who checks RSS feeds anymore?  Case in point.) 

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The thing about realtime search as a concept is that it is just that…  a concept.  Summize was a Twitter search engine and became popular enough for Twitter to buy it and turn it into Twitter search proper. It works ok.  Not great, just ok.  To call it ‘realtime’ search is a bit of a stretch. 

Queries submitted to Twitter’s search are routinely anything but ‘now’.  More often than not, they are at least an hour or so old.  It’s fresh… but it’s not the realtime we’re talking about.  Not only that, but the quality of the results are frequently sketchy at best.  So, it’s search, but it’s not the Google-quality, refined kind of search we are accustomed to.  In short, Twitter Search is to realtime search as the Cincinnati Bengals are to a football team.  Technically, it qualifies (I guess) but it’s really just not very good.

So what is Realtime Search?

Personally I think we have the actual ideal of realtime search all wrong. We have been Googled to the point that we have a hard time getting our minds around a concept of search that isn’t Google-like.  Even in the video for example, we have an example of someone (us probably) using real time search to look for a hotel in Seattle…  Why in the world would you do that?  Regular plain old search is fine for that.  What possible advantage does realtime search have over regular search for that query?  Now, say I wanted to know if the dinner special at the hotel restaurant was good today, THAT would be more realtime search’s domain.

Another problem I have with realtime search and our collective perception of it, is that it’s so Twitter-centric.  I like Twitter as much as anybody (well, most people anyway) but I also liked Alta Vista before we had Google.  I think Twitter is groundbreaking insofar as it popularized the concept of simple, mulitplatform one to many communication.  That’s great, sure.  But Twitter has a good deal of evolving to do if you ask me. 

To me realtime search isn’t even something you do a lot of ‘searching’ on — not in the Google-sense we have grown accustomed to.  If it’s real time, you are checking in on a topic.  It has more in common with trends than it does people.  Once within the subject area, you might run a search for specifics within the history of your topic area, but the topic -what I’m looking to see ‘what’s happening now’- shouldn’t be so much of a search. 

It is a single topic, not one of 50,000 webpages about a topic.  There is only 1 of them.  How to define them is the trick.  Hash tags are a step in that direction I suppose but it’s an awkward, clumsy step at best -in their current state at least.

Following Who or What?

Which brings me to the next point.  Following people is great, but for the purpose of realtime search, it’s pretty much useless.  I am apt to Tweet something about Facebook or Google now and in three hours talk about burning my hamburger helper.  Anytime you get a halfway sizable list of people you are following, it becomes almost impossible to weed thru the chatter without some third party application for Twitter. 

For realtime search we need to think more along the lines of following the subject.  There are several trends sites keeping tabs on top trends in Twitter.  That’s more about what we’re talking about with realtime search.  Except I don’t want to query the trend…  I want to follow the trend – like I follow a person.  Then I can interact with others following that trend. 

Some trends may last weeks, some minutes, some for years.  There may only be 5 people talking about my trend of interest, or there may be 5,000.  Any topic you can imagine can be the subject of somebody’s conversation at any given time, and will be. 

Realtime search is having the ability to find these ‘trends’ or subjects.  Having the ability to interact with the people also following that same trend is something that doesn’t exist yet -that I know of- but it will.   It sure as heck aint Twitter in it’s current form.  Twitter handles scale about as well as Superman handles kryptonite.  I’m not talking about the fail whale either (though I easily could be).  I mean providing Twitter users with tools and methods to manage, filter, and organize information they are interested in.  They seem to have left that to pretty much everybody else to deal with.

Realtime Isn’t Now…. Yet

So we have a little work to do for this realtime search thing.  It will get done though.  The proliferation of mobile devices with easy access to the internet means there are that many more people ready to participate in ‘something’.  That something – or at least the by-product of that something, will be where we get a true realtime search.

I figure the next 3 to 4 years will see a lot of evolution in this whole mass communication Twitter thing. Facebook is Twitterizing itself as fast as they can. Google has Wave coming (I hear it’s going to kill email) and who knows what all else will crop up.  ‘Realtime’ is really a rather exciting time – sooner or later we’ll get it, too.

Original Article: 

Twitter is finally integrating search into its homepage. Search and Trends have been placed into the signed-in homepages of a limited set of accounts for beta testing.

Perhaps the point that we should be focusing on is how important searching Twitter and conversations in general are going to become. There is no question that conversations are gaining a lot of importance on the web, whether that be through Twitter, Facebook, blogs or anything else. People want to know what is going on in the real-time part of the web.

Naturally that leads to questions about Google. With said importance of the real-time web, the search engine leader is likely going to want to get on board this train in one way or another. This is a topic that  has been brought up a lot recently by a number of bloggers. Robert Scoble suggested that this kind of real-time search could even be a threat to Google search, particularly if Facebook got into the mix with its huge number of users.

Danny Sullivan touched on the real-time search subject in an interview with our own Abby Johnson at the recent SMX West Show. He says this is an opportunity search engines could take advantage of (when speaking about ways that search engines could improve in general). WhosTalkin.com is already doing some interesting things in this space.

I’m not sure if Google’s feeling threatened by the concept, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to see Google eventually offer a conversational-search feature of its own. How Google would do this is another question all together, because Twitter may have already reached critical mass with real-time communication. One thing is certain, real-time discussion search is going to continue to grow in importance.

Real-time discussion search has a lot of potential for monetization as well. You know full well how Google would do it (AdWords if I have to say it). You also know that Facebook has been a lot more interested in monetization strategies lately, and Twitter has even promised that its latest round of funding will bring about revenue models. Very interesting.

As for Twitter’s Search itself, only accounts that choose to be publicly accessible are included in Twitter search results. That is apparently over 90% of Twitter users anyway though. No word yet on when the feature will become available to everyone.

Like Google in 2001 (or MySpace in 2004 and YouTube in 2005), one has to wonder what percentage of the CNN audience has ever actually heard of Twitter. It’s existence before an American graduate student sounded alarms about his arrest in Egypt via tweet was limited to a bubble of a few hundred thousand early adopters who kept crashing the thing.

Good thing for James Karl Buck Twitter wasn’t flying the Fail Whale that day. With some funding, some scaling—both of which have happened or are happening—and eventually some monetization, we’ll likely look back at Twitter’s early growing pains with nostalgic fondness; like the Slinky, very cool but didn’t always work.

That reputation brought eventual death speculation by mid-June as developers and users alike bailed on their drunken uncle of an app—though beloved by all, Twitter couldn’t be counted on. And then, Twitter magic, the eureka, the a-ha moments as Summize, Twellow, more recently Twitscoop, and other applications appeared to really capitalize on Twitter’s inherent but elusive utility. In line with that was some funding (thank you very much, says founder Biz Stone) which should help with scaling and whaling.

More importantly, the users started coming back, and within a fortnight Twitter recovered from walking dead status to look surprisingly spry—springy, even. For his next trick, Biz Stone is going to have to tell us how he plans to monetize in the US, especially after promising his US-based users there would be no ads on Twitter. Once he figures out the monetization strategy (it’s not always so easy, ask YouTube), Stone could press the same memetic spirit that drove Google skyward. 

There are lots of options: the Facebook route, which is in effect reneging on Stone’s promise to US users; or the YouTube route—sponsored official Twitter channels. Twitter just bought search engine Summize, so maybe that’s a clue to what Stone plans to do. Instead of monetizing tweets, Twitter will monetize peripheral applications like Summize. Think of Twitter like a portal, then, or maybe like a magnet to which other services attach.

The aforementioned graduate student, once his translator was let out of prison, says he wants to work with Twitter to develop a global network helpline for travelers who find themselves in trouble. Perhaps even that has value. Could you imagine it? "This Emergency Tweet is brought to you by Monopoly’s Get Out of Jail Free campaign."

Ahem. There are probably some private commercial applications, too.  The sky’s the limit, so long as you’ve got something better than birds to fly the whale.

First up, rumors are circulating that Twitter has acquired Summize. There’s no official confirmation yet, but Summize’s search engine and sentiment analysis of Twitter would certainly make a sensible acquisition. Not so much for the public-facing interface, but for the gigabytes of useful information Summize can feed to Twitter’s developers.

Changing focus, VentureBeat reveals that, despite Twitter’s performance issues, the service is still growing strong. In fact, even new competitors such as FriendFeed and Plurk, didn’t prevent Twitter from reaching record levels of users in June. As VentureBeat suggests, at this point Twitter’s biggest enemy is itself.

Every time Twitter is offline, a competitor gets its wings!

So, how is Twitter handling its performance issues? Well, it must be close to being back on track considering its recent talk about improving its API.

The Twitter API is a big part of our success and we will be stabilizing and improving it in the short term. The rate limit is currently set to 20 requests per hour but we’re working to bring it back to 70.

Let’s hope this is a sign that Twitter’s core functions–such as replies and archives–are now stable. Surely Twitter wouldn’t dare talk about API improvements, without first addressing issues with its basic functions.

Love Twitter? Follow my inner-monolog here.

Comments

Yes, that appears to be the case, according to either an unknown British ginger kid with seemingly no connections to anybody in Silicon Valley, or Jason Calacanis, whomever you prefer to get your early rumors from. We’re inclined to say "Nice scoop, Josh."

Mike Arrington finagled a source saying the two companies have been in merger talks for a couple of weeks, and perhaps the same spies spotted a posse from Summize haunting Twitter’s San Francisco HQ.

Om Malik has his own sources who say a deal is in the works and could be announced as early as next week. Asking price? Well, it seems it would have to be less than the $15 million Twitter recently raised and is not, it would seem, spending on infrastructure.

Alright, that was off-sides. VentureBeat says that thanks to less downtime, Twitter is on the mend with users after a noticeable plunge in mid-June. For those following, though, buying Summize isn’t so far from reasonable. During that lamented downtime, Twitter advised loyalists to make use of Summize to get their feex (Twitter fix), while they tightened some bolts.

Leslie Poston isn’t very optimistic about it:

Should Summize truly be acquired by Twitter, I see it losing its usefulness in a hurry as it, too, starts to go down for longer and longer periods of time. Worse would be if it got integrated into Twitter as a feature. You know what Twitter does with useful features, right? It turns them off every other day to "help" scale. Remember the With Others feature? Yeah, I miss that also.

Malik, though, has made sense of it, in a Google-to-AdSense kind of way:

Summize has come-up with a clever way of peering through Twitter’s vast data stream and finding out what’s hot, where and how. The results are essentially keywords – topic, person or location based – and thus can be used to show contextual advertising next to the pages that show these results. Summize, has thereby developed an ability to monetize conversations without being intrusive.

It seems true enough that the side services developed from Twitter not only add value to the platform by legitimizing it, but the side services themselves become valuable. WebProNews’s Twellow.com, built on Twitter’s API, was a hit before it even officially launched. Both services seem to answer the old "what’s the point?" question by adding much needed functionality to an already buzzworthy, but incomplete, platform.