2 Reasons Why Twitter May Not Be Worth So Much to Google and Microsoft After All
Google and Microsoft are both in talks with Twitter to buy access to the company's full fire hose of messages and shared links, according to a report this morning from Kara Swisher at AllThingsD. Could these be blockbuster deals that bring the search giants into the world of the real-time web?
In fact, the Twitter fire hose may be less valuable than outsiders might think. We've been having extensive conversations with a wide variety of real-time web companies in preparation for the Real-Time Web Summit next week and we're lead to question the value of Twitter links for two reasons.
First, there aren't really that many links that get passed through Twitter. The service may be the most visible example of real-time communication but there's a whole lot more going on around the web in real time outside of Twitter. Twitter may see between 3 and 5 million links shared through it each day. Those are heavily biased towards the relatively small number of active content creators on the site and much of it is spam or republished RSS feeds.
Almost every real-time search company we've spoken to has chosen to supplement the indexing power of Twitter with other, larger data sources. OneRiot, for example, says it collects 4X more links from the click-streams that its toolbar users have opted-in to sharing than it does from Twitter. Faroo and Wowd both rely on P2P clients to power indexing far beyond what they can get from Twitter. Implicit behavior offers a lot more data than explicit behavior.
AllVoices uses a whitelist of trusted Twitter users to improve the signal-to-noise ratio and Evri watches trends on Twitter to trigger the building out of their index of the much larger web outside Twitter.
Evri also does some really interesting semantic parsing of the contents of those tweets, adding links as pivot points to the news entities people mention in text. Almost all of the companies we talked to had to do extensive text analysis of Tweets and the pages they linked to. That may not be difficult for Google or Microsoft, but is quick discovery of a few million new links a day challenging enough for them to be worth a big price tag?
You want real-time web links? There are probably already more blog posts being pushed out in real time for free consumption using Pubsubhubbub and RSSCloud than there are links shared on Twitter. As we discussed in our recent post Ten Useful Examples of the Real-Time Web in Action, there's a lot more going on around the web outside of Twitter. Much as we love Twitter, most people suspect its growth is slowing. The rest of the real-time web is believed to be at the beginning of an explosion of growth that will take over the entire internet - eventually almost all information online may be pushed to those who want it, in real time.
Why else do we question the value of the full fire hose? Business Insider reports today that Twitter is already selling access to startups for up to $3k per month. It's hard to know how credible that number is but that's a really low price.
We do know that many startups feel they can get a representative sample of Twitter activity from the company's free API. Twitter may be having a hard time up-selling to the full feed if what's already available is good enough and its crown jewels can't be proven to be that much better.
We love Twitter and with some serious clean-up it may provide big search companies a handy little bundle of high-interest links to advertise against. Is it valuable enough for Google and Microsoft to pay big money for, though? We're not so sure.
Come join us and some very smart people from throughout the diverse real-time web industry to discuss this and related topics next week at the Real-Time Web Summit.
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You mean besides the fact that Twitter service is unreliable? :>P
Posted by: Larry Hawes
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October 8, 2009 11:07 AM
I wish that I had someway to tap into twitter money.
In my opinion, the value is the combination of messages, time and location rather than links. Google and other search engines might understand the need of its user better using Twitter because the distribution of information happens without delay.
For example, events like car accidents, plane crashes or sport scores are available on Twitter faster than any news site or weblog including the exact location from our GPS. As soon as Google understands this content, they will use it adjust search results. If you located in New York and watch a fire in a sky scraper, search results for 'fire newyork' will provide information on this certain event.
Using links to rate a information is one possibility to rank a website, yet Google has already started to use its users to rate information. Google Reader's feature of sharing, starring and liking items is one other variable in their ranking algorithm.
Therefore, I believe Google will increase their effort to move towards real time web.
Thomas
I'm glad this is being pointed out.
I've gone from a guy who wanted Twitter to succeed when many were enjoying their many tech failures... to someone who is now repulsed by the the hyper-valuation of the service, data and company in general.
Today, Twitter looks like a huge scam. And who will get scammed by Twitter? Any company who signs a business contract with them. In particular, CNN and other high-profile brands that have given Twitter massive amounts of free marketing.
Twitter is like an insanely popular rock band with no talent.
You know what I mean.
I think that I have seen the light here. And have started to say that I think Twitter might be the next Friendster.
Here is a blog post I put up recently that touches on some of this thinking... http://vocal.ly/pgg
Sull
In addition to my previous comment, the following article from Josh Cohen gives an interesting twist: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/oct/07/google-josh-cohen-interview
We can't assume that Google and Bing won't innovate relating to how they would handle the firehose from Twitter.
I think Twitter can benefit from some heavy duty analytics (which Bing and Google have the scale to accomplish).
It's a brilliant strategy- if anyone can monetize the "search" aspect of Twitter with scale, that's probably Bing and Google.
But I agree with RWW that I won't be expecting a big down payment for this deal- rather a ramp-up driven approach where it could get big gradually, over time.
Last month I conducted quick little tests on Twitters public timeline on the Monday of each week. Sampling 200 tweets each day, mid afternoon, I found 28% of all tweets had links. Doing a quick sample right now I got 30% with links.
That said, I think there are plenty of links going out, but the point of who is making them plays a huge roll. Twitter's real time media may better be defined as "Twitter's Real Time Media, A Clear Perspective from Marketing People"
That's good .. hoopha ! ..less of a monopoly would be good for the average surfer I suppose. Eh hypey..
I agree that there is alot of spam ad unwanted junk on Twitter, and that needs to be addressed before Google or any other search engine gets involved.