Sunday, September 13, 2009

Twitter search: ephemera for ordinary users so it can be something more for business intelligence?

ephemera: items designed to be useful or important for only a short time, esp. pamphlets, notices, tickets, etc.

I have been thinking for a while (and I’m not alone) that Twitter search has been consciously crippled for a good reason. That is, it’s good for Twitter, still publicly in search of a business model, but obviously trying models on for size. It’s not so good for users.

Here’s an example. I was interested in the inflated attendance counts for the 9/12 events and did a search on “ABC million” for Saturday and Sunday. (A FreedomWorks speaker pulled the figure of 2 million from someair, falsely or erroneously attributed it to ABC News, and word spread across Twitter like a swarm of gnats.)

So, the search proves useful, for the moment, and though the moment is what drives Twitter, you might want a record of the reaction, and your desire would be thwarted. Twitter search results go back only a week and a half at best and developers reserve the right to further limits based on traffic.

You could grab a feed of the search results, but it’s limited to the last 30 tweets. You can let the items pile up in your aggregator, but only starting at the point when you realize it’s a trend. History is important.

The ability to specify dates for a search is nice, but if it only goes back X days the utility is limited. Searching for a range of hours would be a great help, but it’s not available to users either. How would it help? Well, since Twitter is so “of the moment” the narrower the time span the more results you’ll get for a fuzzy query. Let’s say Rachel Maddow says something provocative and I’m not ambitious enough to construct a complicated query of a string of “Or’s.” If I could specify that I only want tweets tweeted from 9 until 10 p.m., most every tweet containing “Rachel” would be in reference to the show, and I’d gain the added benefit of seeing mostly viewers who are tweeting while watching.

So why don’t users have these superpowers? It could be because Twitter needs to curb features to keep from crashing, but it might be that we aren’t given the value-add precisely because it is so valuable.

Can’t you see the charts in the marketing reports? “Since the introduction of the X campaign, mentions of Product Y are up 23% over the previous month and up 67% over this month last year.” Historical trends are gold. Twitter has to be selling the data that could produce them, or they’re holding it back from us while they think about how they could sell it.

Am I an anti-business socialist? Not really, but this sort of behavior on Twitter’s part does bring to mind the traditional labor phrase, “on the backs of the workers.” Twitter users and the words we type are the Twitter product. We’re stakeholders, so if our aggregated facts, sentiments and opinions are on the block, we should get something back—not money, just utility.