It’s no secret to people who know me that I am an inveterate Tweeter. I use - some would say abuse - Twitter. I tweet even more than I drink tea. Mea Culpa.

My current excuse for my tw-addiction is “it’s part of my job”. If I worked in any other industry or role, my pathological use of Twitter would get me fired in a Donald Trump inspired fashion.

Given that Twitter is my drug of choice, I’m deeply fascinated to watch how it evolves. The lastest development in Twitter’s microblogger universe has me even more intrigued than normal. The drug is mutating. More elegantly than H1N1.

Twitter will now start indexing links for its search function. TechCrunch has some initial commentary on the implications of that, as does @mashable and CNet. To quote CNet :

This will make Twitter Search a much more complete index of what's happening in real time on the Web, and make it an even more credible competitor to Google Search for people who are looking for very timely content.

Even the Twitter Search page’s tag line: “See what's happening - right now” could be seen as a bit of a David-taunt to the Search Engine Giant  Goo... I mean Goliath. The implication is that you’ll get timely “happening now” information from Twitter while you'd go to some other online monolith if you want to find “dated” less happening information.

In a world where the sell-by date of information is decreasingly 15 minutes after its birth online this could be a serious challenge to existing players. Twitter are playing the “nimble David” card to the hilt. And it may turn out to be somewhat of a game changer. No wonder rumours abound that Gapple – Google or Apple – are considering buying Twitter. If you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em.

There is an argument against the threatening power of Twitter Search. Given that Twitter runs on CGC (consumer generated content), the results it generates for its Twitter “search engine” would inherently be less reliable and have less authority/quality than other (say Google’s) results.

Twitter seemed to have anticipated this potential shortcoming and have pro-actively planned to counter it. Their  new VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram - ex- VP of Search Quality for Google  - is planning to introduce a reputation ranking system. This system will address the issue of ranking tweets about a certain subject or term according to their “authority” – in a similar vein to how Google ranks Web pages and assigns them a Page Rank.  

As @Mashable points out, this 2-pronged approach by Twitter -  indexing links in Twitter Search and then assigning them a ranking based on the reputation of the tweeter publishing them - could be a “be a very important dent in Google’s seemingly impenetrable armor.”

Along with cynical SEO types, I’ll balance my tw-happiness about this with a few reservations. Initially my thoughts are:

• Limitations on Twitter Search. For example, yesterday I noticed that Twitter have reduced how far back you can “search Tweets” when I was trying to find something I’d hoarded in my twit-stream last year. This is a problem. Not only do I use Twitter to share ideas, but I use it as a repository to note links to interesting bits of information on the Web. I should use a bookmarking tool – but I’d rather use Twitter, right there and then. Perhaps the limitation is a temporary move while they stabilise their development of the search functionality. If not, it may be an impediment to the potential success of these new changes.
• Twitter instability. Anyone who has used Twitter for a while will know the Twitter “fail whale”. Twitter has a rather chequered history around uptime, especially at peak times, like when the Americans wake up. However, this has improved a lot lately and I haven’t spotted a Twitter fail whale in recent memory. Early Twitter adopters would tolerate this kind of technical blip – whereas the later-adopters who are now filling Twitters member ranks are less likley to hang around through such teething pains.
• Twitter’s relationship with its end-users and user retention. About 50% of Twitter users become inactive after 30 days. So even though the member base has burgeoned to just under 20 Million globally in the past few months – many of those will fall off and use the service spasmodically. Twitter is also, in some senses, not an end-user friendly company. Like the recurring “fail whale” issues demonstrated last year – Twitter does things in its own sweet time and it doesn’t matter how much its users are inconvenenienced while it does that. Unlike Facebook, it doesn’t seem to care whether its users object to changes or not. Time will tell whether Twitter’s usefulness will offset its limited user empathy.
• Twitter sustainability and revenue model. Unlike Google, Twitter has yet to arrive at a revenue model to monetise its growing user base. This could raise questions over how sustainable Twitter can be long term, especially in the current economic climate where ad revenues are increasingly hard won.
• Managing more sophisticated spam and security. Twitter currently deals with spammers by “killing” the accounts of the more flagrant ones. However, if you build it, the spammers will come. Twitter will need to develop more than a reputation ranking factor to be able to deal with the army of spammers who will no doubt attack its free-for-all stream as a potential traffic source. Additionally - Twitter’s API is fairly unregulated at present. Any garage-based Joe can use the API to write a Twitter application to encourage people to offer up their user-name an password. The recent Twitter worm was fairly benign – but it did show that Twitter was vulnerable to that sort of deviant behaviour. As Twitter accounts develop some sort of value due to their reputation ranking this will become an issue Twitter will need to address.

Most of my reservations above could be resolved either by :

• Throwing some cash at the problem and evolving the Twitter functionality and infrastructure so it is more stable and has more depth; and
• Applying some strategic and creative business acumen to develop a way to monetise the Twitter phenomenon without antogonising Twitter’s loyal followers.

Let’s see how Twitter continues to evolve and addresses them. 

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