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!

© 2008 Twitter

After much badgering I thought that I would give twitter a go and see what all the fuss is about. I created an account ages ago but have not bothered doing anything with it (and will probably continue not to).

The only problem with this is that I have gone into my account and tried to update a few things, and I am not kidding when I say that every request either didnt complete by just timing out or I got some dodgy “Technical Error” page from them. How shit is that! I thought that they were meant to have sorted these issues out? It can be done I am sure and its about time that they sent in some proper engineers who know what they are doing and sort it out if they hope to get anywhere and start earning some money. It wont be long before Facebook are at their heels and compete with them considering they have just turned down a takeover offer. I know that Facebook also suffers technical problems but so far in my experience no where near the amount with twitter.

I also put a little update javascript thing in my side bar but it only loads in every other page request. It doesnt interfere my page loading because I put the JS at the bottom of the page (I know why they recommend this now) so I will leave it in for now hoping that it at least gets a little better. Not very impressed so far – not at all.