socialmedian: Discovering the Power of Twitter's Real-Time Search

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Discovering the Power of Twitter's Real-Time Search

Submitted by Sylvain from Google Reader

Dec 08, 2008

Summary

A-ha moments often come when the conventional method lets you down and you need to try something new. That happened on Saturday when Gmail was unavailable to me for over an hour. The outage was long enough for me to have to set up a Yahoo Mail account to send an urgent email. I also used Basecamp to communicate with my ReadWriteWeb colleagues; through that, I learned that Gmail was fine for them. So I started my research online to see what was happening. Of course I started my search with Google, which was not of much use. Then I tried Twitter.

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Google Search for "Gmail Down" Was Not Helpful

One of the queries I used on Google was "Gmail outage," but "Gmail down" is how most people report problems. You can see past problems reported on blogs and media sites. We have covered the subject before on ReadWriteWeb, and ideally we don't want to focus on failures of Gmail or the cloud.

Twitter Search Scores

Searching "Gmail down" on Twitter gave me much more useful data. And you can see the data in real time (using the layman's version of the query). When I searche

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Comments (2)

Hutch,

Dec 10, 2008

"Most of the commentary on our Help Twitter Find A Revenue Model post focuses on the social aspects of Twitter and uses those as the basis of a revenue model. Those models, though, mostly feel like an intrusion on Twitter's primary function.

But is there potential in search?"