Battelle: Twitter Is The YouTube Of Real-Time Search
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No, we don’t have a Twitter-post-a-day rule but John Battelle’s Twitter-YouTube latest riff deserves a mention. While others tend to look at Google’s acquisition of YouTube as a video/audience play with search as an aspect, John contends—in hindsight, he admits—it was all about search: “YouTube was a massive search asset. After all, YouTube now gets more searches than Yahoo, Google’s closest search rival. ... YouTube was the single, fastest growing new form of search on the Web, and Google (NSDQ: GOOG) pretty much outflanked (and outspent) everyone to buy it. Not to get into video monetization, per se, but to harvest and control the most important emerging form of search. In short, Google could not afford to NOT own YouTube.” More after the jump.
Where does Twitter come in? “What’s the most important and quickly growing form of search on the web today? Real time, conversational search. And who’s the YouTube of real time search? Yep. Twitter. It’s an asset Google cannot afford to not own, and also, one they most likely do not have the ability (or brand permission) to build on their own.”
Good luck with that. As John also mentions, co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone already have sold one business—Blogger—to Google and they aren’t likely to try it again. Call the $35 million latest funding the Google independence round.
Given that I’ve made as many searches on Twitter in the last 24 hours as on Google, in my own echo chamber he makes a lot of sense. I think mobile search is ahead in terms of importance though—and that the real breakthrough will be a true meshing of the two.
Posted In: Search, Social Media, Technologies / Formats, Companies, Google, YouTube, Twitter, john battelle
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