[image credit: Wired]

I doubt it….but the meme is growing

I first saw a blog post written last week when it was tweeted (of course) by pointing to Google's First Real Threat? Twitter. Today Silicon Alley Insider posted a similar but longer version entitled Google Next Victim Of Creative Destruction?

Clearly Google is the big competitor of Microsoft in search and though we play in search Google has more to lose. However, this post isn’t about my desire to see Microsoft win or Google lose. It’s about the changing landscape of the Internet and search. I actually don’t think Google has that much to fear from Twitter…at least for some time.

However, if I were TripAdvisor or any other recommendation site I would be hooking myself up to that Twitter API pretty damn fast. I’m heading to New York soon. The best hotel in NYC with best rates? I know where I’m going to look for my answer….and it’s not Google nor TripAdvisor. Ditto when I buy my next laptop, car, bike…the list goes on.

Scoble has a long post on this but a big nugget is buried in his post.

Twitter is a brilliant recommendation engine.

Don’t believe me? Check out David Pogue’s experiment in the NY Times recently. This gets played out millions of times per day on Twitter. People ask a question and they get an almost instant response. Often from people the trust and often corroborated by many.

Why is Twitter a brilliant recommendation engine? Two reasons

1. People increasingly value speed & recentness – I want the response now. Not when the crawler gets there. We are entering the era of real-time search.
2. People increasingly trust people – well I do and my friends do that’s for sure.

On that second point, search is getting more social and Gerry Campbell captured it nicely in his post and matrix below

Let me be clear here - I’m certainly not saying Google is going away overnight but changes are afoot. The web is moving and the early adopters are already all over Twitter both for news and for advice. When I open my PC here’s what happens

• I run Twhirl on startup connecting me to the Twitterverse immediately to get my news fix. 
• I run a search on my own name on search.twitter.com to see who replied, retweeted, sent me messages overnight or asked me a question
• I run http://www.twitscoop.com/ to see what the news right now is via Twitter
• ….then I open Outlook

What I’m saying is Twitter is fast becoming my prime source of communication and news.

A case in point this afternoon (literally as I write this). Tim Lovejoy (ex Sky Sports journalists) tweeted that Luiz Felipe Scolari had just been sacked by Chelsea FC. Knowing Tim is a joker I thought I’ll check with the BBC website…nothing on their site. 10 seconds later, at least 3 people corroborate Tim on Twitter. About 5 minutes later, the BBC had the news up. Ironically one of those tweets corroborating Tim was from a BBC journalist.

Why does all of that matter? What did it prove?

It proved that Twitter is very, very fast and even though I didn’t trust Tim, the community quickly verified his post and I trusted the community. Risky maybe but speed counts for a lot right now. As Gerry’s matrix shows, more considered content will come over time but with a delay but I need that stuff less and less.

There are still huge challenges of course – the Twitter corpus is small and quite specific to early adopters right now and sites like Twitscoop really only show trends from the US and UK (I’d expect to see the Australian bush fires on there) but like I said earlier, things change fast.

Twitter may well be the future of search. I’ve been telling anyone who will listen (not many admittedly) for a while that Twitter is the next big thing and whilst it’s yet to really break in to the mainstream yet, many of us can remember when our friends first started whispering the word Google to us and telling us how much better it was than Yahoo! – things change quickly around here. Sometimes right when you’re looking at them.