for Silicon Valley's chattering classes, the microblogging company has emerged as something much more—the next Google, the next Facebook, or maybe some unbeatable combination of the two. "It's time to start thinking of Twitter as a search engine," TechCrunch's Michael Arrington declared this week... By collecting millions of peoples' immediate thoughts, Twitter is building the Web's best database of "real time" information, these people argue. And that collection might be very valuable—when people want to know what's going on in the world right now, they'll increasingly check Twitter, not Google.First, explain how Twitter, in its current form, could become "some unbeatable combination" of Facebook and Google? Does the author even know what Google is?
Second, WHO CHECKS GOOGLE to find out what's going on right now? And what does that that even mean? If I want to check the stock market, I have a home page for that. If I want to check whether Obama said anything shocking, I go to the NYT site or Drudge or Politico. If I'm curious who won the Lakers game, I have a TV for that. And, um, iGoogle. Nearly everything is on TV or on the web instantaneously. So what is Twitter good for? Luckily, the author continues:
Let's start with the Twitter-beats-Google theory. For proponents, two recent events stand out: last year's terrorist attacks in Mumbai and the water landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in New York. Both times, people on the scene began Twittering what they were seeing and hearing, and Twitter's search engine became one of the first places on the Web to carry the news.So in the event of a terrorist attack or a plane crash, Twitter >>>>> Google. Wonderful.
