It would appear that Twitter might be considering giving away their crown jewels to Google for what I gather to be nothing. By crown jewels I mean their full stream of live tweets. Google would most definitely pay for this I have no doubt (which is why it may seem like a good option to twitter’s investors to claw back some cash) but in the long run its worth every penny to Google. Instead of people going to twitter.com to search for current stuff, they can (and will) just head to Google for everything. During this time Google could pull their finger out and replace it with a system of their own (fairly easily), further relegating twitter into the dustbin of yesteryear.

Twitter has the opportunity to find a nice solution of placing ads within streams. Damn, this could be killer for advertisers – the ability to get a presence within what is happening right now. Nothing has really offered this to advertisers before (well nothing that comes to mind anyway). Twitter’s problem is that they have left the gates wide open to competitors like facebook who have managed to put their entire service around a twittified “live feed” and will no doubt find a way pretty quickly to cash in on it. What has twitter been doing? They could have been experimenting more with monetisation ideas trying to find one that works really well – plus they could (and should) be pushing the boat out and taking a few risks of finding a great solution. You don’t get anywhere by copying the other guy (although I am sure that there are times where it works well). They could come up with something neat, unobtrusive, engaging and most of all lucrative. At the end of the day no one yet has found the perfect solution for this kind of “real time” search and there will no doubt be a better solution than keyword advertising in traditional search.

Google managed to dominate their arena – is everyone else going to let them do the same to theirs? Don’t let yourself just twitter away!

The Time Has Come To Regulate Search Engine Marketing And SEO

If your work or business depends on Search (which is almost everyone) then have a read of the above article. It just goes to show that there may be something in what he says and it backs up what I have been saying about Google for a while now. Google are not bad (no worse than any other company out there to make money) its just that they have too much of a hold on commerce on the internet. Microsoft did (and does) hold a monopoly on OS’s etc but we don’t actually need their software to conduct business (in the strictess sense). You can get other software that does the same job. Google though is the gateway of the internet for the majority of users and through their dominance of search and paid listings they basically have the power to do what they want and guide users in whichever way they see fit. They also have the power to punish those players that do not play by their rules – I am not saying that they do this but they are certainly in a position to be able to. Anyway, read it and see what you think.