Online Real Estate Technology

Twitter Micro Blogging

If you like to search Twitter for emerging trends by using #tags, for example, searching #swineflu on Twitter will not only bring up the thousands of tweets on the subject, you’ll also be able to monitor new tweets as they are published. However the Twitter search engine is no Google, all it does is index tweets and is great for monitoring conversations but not much else. 

This is about to change as Twitter are about to launch new searching capabilities such as being able to crawl the links included in tweets, there are a lot of links published daily and the ability to search these to find useful information or group them into catagories so you can read or search them later would be a very useful tool, also there’s a hint that Twitter will also include a Reputation ranking system. This will mean that not all tweets will be equal, rank will be calculated for each twitterer and could be based on number of followers, number of retweets etc.

The ability of the Twitter search engine to crawl links will give Twitter the scope to be able to compete with the likes of Google. It will be very interesting to see if Google’s search algorithm based on the number of inbound links to a web site, will stay superior to Twitters, which is based on real people’s conversations.

Another interesting situation to monitor is recent research from Neilsen On Line which indicates that 6 out of 10 people who use Twitter do not return after their first month of usage, in comparison, Facebook’s and Myspace retention rates are at 60%.

You can follow Mike on Twitter here and get the Tweets as they happen!! 

Here’s the figures from Neilsen for you:

60% of Twitter Users Don't Return after First Month