Twitter has made Real Time Search a new field. First it was associated with what people called ‘ambient awareness’ and now this microblogging site has been called a real time search engine. Of course, the popularity of microblogging started with the rise of Twitter and is now a popular concept. Even those who don’t yet see (like I did not see it for quite some time) the utility of microblogging and associated infrastructure are sure to start seeing this soon.
Even Google seems to be worried about this real time search business. See this piece.
For researchers in this and related area, the approaches adopted in Twitter are unique and of some interesting long-term concepts. How do you create an index of ‘live’ data — currently microblogs — with latency measured today in seconds is something that was not considered a possibility. Now that we see that this is possible, this is going to open up many new application areas.
I find it particularly interesting because it is a concrete example of events being created by people. These events could be considered atomic events. One could start using various tools to link these and start creating an EventWeb and this EventWeb could give some interesting analytics and insights in what is going on in a particular geographic area, or in a partical intellectual area, or with a particular person/organization. Very interesting.
How far is the ‘sensor-based blogging’ once this infrastructure is well understood? I don;t think too far.
Very interesting and true. Twitter is crazy popular. I really didn’t think for a minute that this application would attract this many people. I guess it could be targeted as a tool for information per geographical area. That would be interesting for a company to base it marketing efforts per region of what Twitter users are doing or saying. In internet marketing, I get at least 1 email a day with someone selling an ebook on the power of marketing on Twitter.
Twitter is a little too personal for me.
Twitter is still something of a mystery to me. I can’t quite figure out to use it effectively.