Twitter Search: Still Missing One Key Component

By on August 25, 2007 in Conversations, Cool Tools with 4 Comments

I dig the new Twitter Search feature.  A few quick searches found some old friends in new spaces.

It’s still missing one thing: a feed. I want to Search Once and Subscribe.

In a recent Fast Company piece, Robert Scoble writes about Twitter as The Next Email:

"Sales and marketing are lagging in seeing the potential here. When I
used all these services to tell the world that my wife and I were
expecting a child in September, I anticipated hearing from the world’s
largest consumer-products companies begging me to try their latest
diapers, food, car seats, and financial instruments. What came back?
Nothing."

Is everyone in "sales and marketing" supposed to follow Scoble? They can subscribe to his twitter feed. But why? 

Using Robert and Maryam’s scenario above, a one-time Twitter search for "pregnant" and subscribing to the feed might have gotten P&G knocking down the door with offers.

Twitter_search

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  • http://opinionatedmarketers.blogspot.com John Whiteside

    Because really, what users are dying for is the ability to have marketers find personal details about them from things like Twitter and start spamming them. Each night they go to bed in tears, pining for a love of a large packaged goods company.

  • http://jburg.typepad.com/future Jon Burg

    Twitter is missing much more than just one thing. Twitter’s power lies in it’s cross platform capability. It’s essentially a cross platform short form message board/chat room. Twitter could be that much more powerful if it offered users the ability to have private responses and conversations within the client, if it offered rich media integration (think thumbnails that blew out into video of pics) and much much more! Twitter is the first generation of a new generation of cross platfrom capable solutions.
    However, as Twitter and other new media properties become increasingly personal with text alerts to cell phones and more, users will become increasingly more wary of brand interusion on those experience. To John Whiteside’s comment above, we as consumers don’t want to brands intruding on our personal space, we look to them to augment and empower our experiences. As you’ve begun to suggest, P&G would best be served my monitoring Twitter and joining the conversations as an individual users. If someone is asking for Pregnancy Advice (in your example), P&G could direct them to a solution in a way that does not annoy all involved. We don’t want Twammers (Twitter Spammers – lets copyright that one) we want Twitters – one-to-many shortform messages that provide us with meaningful utility that is timely, relevant, compelling and welcome within our personal Twitters.

  • http://www.tweetscan.com David Sterry

    I think there’s something about having a good search for Twitter that’s hindering people really getting into it. To find people to follow, you’ve basically got to search by what they put in their description or wait around on the public timeline for something interesting to catch your eye.
    With a search engine, like the one I created(tweetscan.com) you can find when people mention something of interest to you and reply or follow or sign up for an email alert so you can stay informed about what you care about.

  • http://www.lvrealty.net C Richey

    I’m not all that enamored with Twitter. One of the conferences I was in at Pubcon talked about it, and the presenter loved it. There is potential there, but you can do the same thing other way. Its kind of funny that Scoble didn’t get a single offer or free products from this twitter account.

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