“I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010″
That’s Google’s first ever Twitter update which translates from binary to F E E L I N G L U C K Y.
I mentioned Googling “wising up” because regardless of what certain friends of mine think Twitter is the best website on the internet. I don’t call it the best website on the internet because of the actual code or design because frankly that’s not all that special or important. I call it the best website on the internet because of it’s potential power. The power of the people and the speed at which “tweets” spread is what makes Twitter a force to be reckoned with.
Twitter is far more than just an easy way to let your Facebook friends know what you are doing, it is in fact a real-life instant news cast. Information and news spread so quickly on Twitter that the average blogger can scoop even the biggest of stories over the television and print media. Take two recent plane crashes for example; the Flight 1404 crash in Denver was first announced on Twitter just moments after it happened, while the best information and pictures about the heroic landing of Flight 1549 came from real-time Tweets, not CNN or MSNBC.
What Twitter does is let those hundreds of millions of people walking around with cell phones instantly share their reactions to real-life events with their friends. Then their followers “re-tweet” those stories and the chain keeps on going until it is virally all over the internet in a matter of minutes. A story can literally take just a few minutes to be all over the globe, old-school media just can’t compare to that. Throw in Twitter’s new search.twitter.com feature and you have a reason to give Google worry.What? Google worry? I must be stoned right?
Google has always been the company whose main goal was getting people the information they wanted as soon as they could by providing and indexing the world’s information better than anyone else. For years they have succeeded at that but if there is one area that Google lags behind it is information gathering from real-time and breaking events. Their indexing servers and spiders are fast but they are no match for millions of always on micro-bloggers sharing breaking news and events in real-time with the world.
Twitter’s growth is staggering and venture capitalists are paying attention. Twitter recently turned down a half-billion stock offer from Facebook and maybe for good reason. In my opinion Google needs to get out the big checkbook and make Twitter an offer they can’t refuse… before it’s too late.
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