Twitter Revisited :: Spitter

Following up on the previous post’s spam theme, I’ve just now posted the following to battellmedia.com (minor edits here for “readability”; I expect it will show up there shortly if/when it’s approved [I added some links — that usually seems to trip spam filters]):

Perhaps the interest in twitter comes from a community that has become aware that Google is no longer a useful resource for information retrieval. Since the other generic search engines are virtually identical clones, they aren’t exactly viable alternatives (though perhaps they are not quite as heavy-handed in censorship — at least if you go by the results for “miserable failure”).

I wonder how twitter would deal with a similar issue: What if someone started to breathe down *their* necks? And besides that: What is their revenue model? What about http://twitter.com/nmw/statuses/803723299 ?

I blogged about twitter in two installments about 10 days ago (here’s the first).

In all, I think the move to twitter.com or digg.com or similar “social” applications is most of all a move away from google (and similar “one-size fits-all” models) (and in that vein: the fact that digg.com is apparently aiming to be for “all” news does not really bode well for it’s future — I think they are biting off more than they can chew if the choose to go in that direction [and the same would hold for other social applications that are likewise insufficiently “community aware”]).

With the increasing amount of noise on twitter, I feel that it will — as with similar social applications (not just digg.com but even more so e.g. myspace.com, facebook.com, — and hundreds if not thousands like them) — ultimately become a superfluous bowl of soup that runneth over with meaningless nonsense and/or opinions about trivial pursuits.

I think one of the momentous events of the last year was the hotly debated launch of registrant search (see Jay’s blog post). Once spammers begin to realize that their spam tactics can be revealed (I guess if the whois data is invalid, then the registrations would be cancelled), they will think twice about using fraudulent behavior.

Honest people are becoming more and more willing to embrace transparency — and that is a world in which secrecy and/or secret formulas are simply old-fashioned and irrelevant: A transparent formula made Google popular, a secret formula will probably do it in.

Ultimately, the level playing field will be the most effective method: I know that you are battellemedia.com, and you know that I am nmw.info (or you could figure it out with registrant search). Since information “wants to be free” (or at least very cheap), such data will be traded according to market forces until profits approach zero.

I do not doubt that the demise of one-size fits-all search engines will ultimately improve the search experience of the wider public searching for information. Do I, personally, need to perform a registrant search on the domains of the many millions of hotel websites that exist? No — but perhaps it might be in the interest of hotels.com to do so. After all, selling viagra on hotels.com should be ruled out (well: I think it should ;D)….

This entry was posted on Mon, 2008-May-12 at 08:00 and is filed under Marketing, Advertising, Commerce, Domains & Domain Names. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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