Twitter... a search engine?

Being in SEM, this is a dangerous post for me, but I do not think that search.twitter.com in its current form is the next big thing in search as John Battelle and many others do.

Look at one of Twitter's current most popular queries today: Bobby Jindal...

How valuable is this information from Twitter;
vs. this information from wikipedia;
or this information from Google Blogsearch;
or this information from Google News;
or this information from YouTube;

I think it is more fair to say: Twitter has developed an index of real-time thoughts and opinions. The value of Twitter is the data; but like any raw data it needs context, understanding and intuitive display.

An interesting application using Twitter's index was developed by Yahoo engineers combining Twitter with Yahoo News on the Yahoo Boss system - TweetNews Search. I find this information superior to the information above because it meets the user requirements of in-depth information, smart user interface and also delivers on the promise of real-time information and timely data sorting.

I look forward to seeing what else the other search engines (including search.twitter.com) can do with Twitter data...

Update 3/6/09: Bill Simmon's take on Twitter: "In 15 years, writing went from "reflecting on what happened and putting together some coherent thoughts" to "reflecting on what happened as quickly as possible" to "reflecting on what's happening as it's happening" to "here are my half-baked thoughts about absolutely anything and I'm not even going to attempt to entertain you," or as I like to call it, Twitter/Facebook Syndrome."

Update 3/9/09: I was just getting an error when trying to sign into Windows Live Messenger. The error I received said that the service was unavailable. That seemed strange and I thought to myself, "How do I verify this?" I first thought about Google News, but decided that was too slow. So I went to Twitter... lo and behold, others are having problems too. So, that was a pretty cool search experience (though it would have been better if Microsoft had tweeted, "We're working on it".

Update 3/13/09: More thinking on Twitter after I read Chris Copeland's article on Search Insider. The other search app not covered by the search.twitter.com app is the Q&A aspect of tweeting questions, thoughts or comments to friends. Unlike email where users force their random emails into someone else's inbox, Twitter has an elegant passiveness to it. If you want too participate, you can. If you want to just sit on the sidelines and watch, you can. If you want to ignore tweets altogether, you can. The Q&A aspect of this is certainly interesting angle on search, you just have to make sure your friends are more reliable than Google!

Update 3/31/09: Good article from a fellow Jeeviant alumni, Peter Hersberg, on the Q&A aspect of Twitter.