Follow @znbeta To Sign up for Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit Private Beta!
As you may have seen, Twitter is adding a feature to Twitter Search to rank tweets by popularity. Here’s the announcement from Twitter’s Developer Advocate, Taylor Singletary, to the Twitter Developers’ Google Group:
“The Search team is working on a beta project that returns the most popular tweets for a query, rather than only the most recent tweets. This is a beta project, but an important first step to surface the most popular tweets for users searching Twitter.
“You can expect many improvements as we tune and tweak our algorithms, but we want to give everyone a heads up so we can go over the implications for those consuming the search API.”
There’s quite a bit of discussion on the group about this within the developer community, which you can read here. Most of it seems to be about the technical aspects, though, and not about the philosophical or marketing aspects. So I’d like to get a discussion going here about the coming changes in those contexts. Some frames of reference:
There are two types of search users: those who are searching for something and those who want to be found. Search would not exist if either was missing! Pause a moment and let that sink in, because I think it’s something we often forget.
Search costs money. The web crawlers, the indexes, the information retrieval algorithm development, the disk drives, memory and processors and the electricity to power all of them is a significant fraction of the world’s total IT spending, and this spending is growing faster that many other parts of IT spending.
Seekers can further be divided into two classes: those who are “just looking for information” and those with commercial intention – people with real needs or wants who want to buy something. Microsoft distinguishes between the two and even provides keyword tools to help search marketers distinguish between the two!
And those who want to be found can similarly be divided into two classes, although the distinction is a little less clear here: those who want to teach/inform and those who want to market/sell. The search “bargain” we have mostly signed up for is this:
Those with something to sell allocate part of their marketing budgets for advertising, search engine optimization, etc. The aggregated advertising money pays for the search infrastructure, which is then made available to all seekers, regardless of whether they are looking for information or want to buy something. The seeker in general pays nothing for the search service.
So that’s the context. If you’re either type of search user – seeker or seller – what do you think about adding popularity to Twitter Search? You can comment here via IntenseDebate or on Twitter using the hashtag #tweetsearchpop.
