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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.
Seeker Or Seller: What Do You Think About Adding Popularity To Twitter Search? – Borasky Research Journal http://meb.tw/bY0SI8
No matter what others say, I think it is still interesting and useful maybe necessary to improve some minor things
RT @TopsyRT: Seeker Or Seller: What Do You Think About Adding Popularity To Twitter Search? http://bit.ly/cK0shc
RT @znmeb: "There are two types of search users: those who are searching for something and those who want to be found" http://meb.tw/bY0SI8
RT @TopsyRT: Seeker Or Seller: What Do You Think About Adding Popularity To Twitter Search?http://bit.ly/cK0shc
Seeker Or Seller: What Do You Think About Adding Popularity To Twitter Search? http://borasky-research.net/2010/03/19/s... via @AddToAny
@znmeb @AddToAny I like it. #tweetsearchpop
"There are two types of search users: those who are searching for something and those who want to be found" http://meb.tw/bY0SI8
“There are two types of search users: those who are searching for something and those who want to be found” http://borasky-research.net/2010/03/19/s...
RT @znmeb: “There are two types of search users: those who are searching for something and those who want to be found” http://borasky-research.net/2010/03/19/s...
Seeker Or Seller: What Do You Think About Adding Popularity To Twitter Search? http://bit.ly/dBVj5H via @AddToAny
Seeker Or Seller: What Do You Think About Adding Popularity To Twitter Search? http://meb.tw/bY0SI8
Seeker Or Seller: What Do *You* Think About Adding Popularity To Twitter Search? http://meb.tw/bY0SI8 #ireadSBoSM
Seeker Or Seller: What Do You Think About Adding Popularity To Twitter Search? http://meb.tw/bY0SI8
@TNW_socialmedia Please comment on my blog post "What Do You Think About Adding Popularity To Twitter Search?" http://meb.tw/bY0SI8
The reason the change is inconvenient for developers is that they have developed apps which rely on the search api giving them the most recent results for their search term, and not the most popular. Further, social media monitoring services or practices that rely in any way on the search api could be borked. I want to know how tweetdeck will deal with this – I currently have 6 search columns open, and if these were going to operate on the basis of popularity then, frankly, I would stop using it. If the default is going to be popularity (and here we have another problem – twitter have not defined popularity), then any app that relies on recentness will have to be rebuilt to be meaningful.
I understand why the developers are upset – they're absolutely right about not wanting the API vibrating under their feet while they're trying to serve their customers. But I'm more interested in the changes to search itself as perceived by the two classes of search users – seekers and sellers. The monitoring services *should* be migrating to Streaming. The ones with established business partnerships with Twitter have for the most part already migrated, and I wouldn't expect them to be vocal on the open Google Group if they hadn't.
So what's your opinion as a *user* of Twitter Search? I agree – they do need to define "popularity", but I'm not a heavy Search user. The only two major use cases I have for Search are for gathering historical data about an event. I'm not sure how the changes are going to affect those cases – I think my code will simply ignore new key-value pairs in the returned objects, so the code will only break if key-value pairs that I am using disappear.
RT @znmeb: Seeker Or Seller: What Do You Think About Adding Popularity To Twitter Search? #tweetsearchpop http://meb.tw/bY0SI8
@lizasperling ah yes – end user experience – see my blog post today about Twitter search http://meb.tw/bY0SI8
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by znmeb: Seeker Or Seller: What Do You Think About Adding Popularity To Twitter Search? #tweetsearchpop http://meb.tw/bY0SI8...
i, for one, have been waiting for this for a dozen years! now i can complete my project at http://www.thefrequency.tv
That's a nice page!! How are you accessing Twitter – via Search or Streaming?
Most of the discussion on the Twitter Developers' Google Group seems to be about how inconvenient the change is to developers. I want to know how search users feel about it!
Seeker Or Seller: What Do You Think About Adding Popularity To Twitter Search? #tweetsearchpop http://borasky-research.net/2010/03/19/s...
RT @znmeb: Seeker Or Seller: What Do You Think About Adding Popularity To Twitter Search? #tweetsearchpop http://borasky-research.net/2010/03/19/s...