Twitter Confirms New Google Firehose Deal

http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/05/twitter-confirms-new-google-firehose-deal-to-distribute-traffic-to-logged-out-users/

by will_brown • 11 years ago

144 62 11 years ago

techcrunch.com

jarcoal• 11 years ago

I wasn't a huge fan of seeing them in the SERPs back in the day; hopefully Google has an opt-out.

I wouldn't mind if somehow it was integrated into Google News; that could be cool.

sparkzilla6• 11 years ago

The signal (actual news) to noise (opinions, comments, satire) is very high so adding Twitter to news is probably not a good idea.

jaredsohn• 11 years ago

I think you mean "very low"

myko• 11 years ago

I feel the complete opposite - I used to Google for specific tweets I remembered seeing and to help find tweets relating to current events. Google was much better about showing me the stuff I wanted to see than the actual Twitter site!

I'm really excited to have this back.

codingdave• 11 years ago

.. which is exactly why an opt-out would be a good solution. People can see what they want, and rbing in tweets when/if appropriate.

asuffield• 11 years ago

Does -site:twitter.com count as an "opt-out"?

Nicholas_C• 11 years ago

I wouldn't mind if somehow it was integrated into Google News; that could be cool.

I've wanted to build a site that mixes news feeds with tweets about said news. Some news sites have weak twitter streams to the side but it would be cool to have something more immersive.

mcintyre1994• 11 years ago

You might find reddit live interesting, it does a pretty good job of this imo. For example, https://www.reddit.com/live/u9z0oa5c4jud/ and http://www.reddit.com/live/u7qtz12ybb74

Together with being crowd sourced it's a really fresh take on breaking news.

ProAm• 11 years ago

Its going to be heavily censored anyway, Twitter has an excessive amount of trolls, harassment and negative tweets in regards to any major social news event. There is no way Google will let that hit the search results.

jpalomaki• 11 years ago

Wonder what is more valuable: showing tweets along the search results or being able to use them to rank other search results?

Especially for stuff that is happening right now, tweets probably contain pretty good information on what are the most relevant sources of information. And since the text part is show short, it is easier to match what this tweet is related to.

rrggrr• 11 years ago

That crash you heard today was the real-time data door slamming shut on Facebook, Microsoft, etc. Say what you might about Twitter's slowing growth, but mainstream news cycles and breaking news are increasingly preceded by and/or quote tweets. Where are Google's competitors going to turn to deliver similar real time results? PR Newswire? Associated Press? Reuters? Huge win for Google who needed this and big oversight on the part of Facebook IMHO.

austenallred9• 11 years ago

I talk with the Google News Labs team on occasion (it's a brand new team, which should tell you something), and I can safely say there's a race going on in real time news (My company is building a real-time crowdsourced newsroom - https://grasswire.com). My guess is there will be some major acquisitions taking place in the real-time news space this year. Facebook, Microsoft and Google are all realizing it's going to be a landgrab. If nothing else it's fun and exciting.

sparkzilla6• 11 years ago

it's a brand new team, which should tell you something

What does that tell you? I'm not sure if it's good or bad.

Having seen a few attempts at crowdsourced newsrooms (infobitt, Inside.com, the earlier version of Grasswire) I don't see how they compete with Twitter. At best they filter Twitter and are in competition with Google News. That said, I'm also in that space with Newslines a crowdsourced news archive (http://newslines.org) so the idea of a hot news acquisition market is all to the good.

dchuk• 11 years ago

FYI, your landing page still references January as when something new is coming.

DonHopkins• 11 years ago

What ever happened to Technorati?

fpgeek• 11 years ago

I don't follow your logic. I didn't see anything in the story that indicated that the deal was exclusive.

Twitter certainly wouldn't want it to be - they're trying to increase reach. In theory, I can see how Google might want the advantage of an exclusive data source. However, in practice I suspect Google thinks they can get enough of an advantage from using Twitter's firehose better than their competitors do, especially since paying extra to get Twitter to lock out competitors would invite even more antitrust scrutiny.

With the Google/Twitter firehose deal, Google's competitors have lost a potential advantage, but that doesn't mean they've picked up a corresponding disadvantage.

beedogs• 11 years ago

big oversight on the part of Facebook IMHO.

Status updates != tweets

For one thing, most status updates aren't public. It would be absolutely horrifying if they suddenly became so, just to be fed into a search engine.

thomasfoster96• 11 years ago

Facebook is certainly testing a public status updates firehose: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/public_feed/

cryptoz• 11 years ago

That depends on who you are. For a very important segment of users, Status Updates == Tweets. Additionally, from the perspective of their followers, it would not be horrifying if those suddenly became more public. In fact, for certain users, that may be preferred.

Social networks are weird to talk about on forums online since everyone has such personal experiences with them. I think that this taints our perspective more than usual, and makes it more difficult to properly assess their real value.

Not to take sides over FB vs TWTR. But, your "absolutely horrifying" could very well be everyone else's "absolute best case".

jussij• 11 years ago

but mainstream news cycles and breaking news are increasingly preceded by and/or quote tweets.

That is nothing more than an indication main stream news is no longer reporting the news, but rather quoting gossip, which I don't disagree is the case.

News organizations around the world are facing cost pressures, so rather than pay a specialist to investigate and write articles, it's much cheaper to pay a lesser skilled worker to troll Twitter and copy and paste a few tweets.

But those news organizations are on a race to the bottom.

If people aren't prepared to pay for well research, well written, hard hitting journalistic articles, they are certainly not going to pay for a few copied tweets.

smackfu• 11 years ago

Facebook has a real-time feed of which tweets are being shared on Facebook. That seems like enough signal to capture major happenings.

nubbee• 11 years ago

Twitter is going to redirect users to a "logged out" page if they click on a tweet in search results and are not already logged in. How's that not cloaking and against google' own guidelines?[1]

Google wants to index tweets and Twitter wants to nip their growth stagnation in the butt. Two, otherwise fine companies, came to this half-arsed compromise that's solely based on fear of missing out rather than creating something that serves users. Or am I being too harsh here?

[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604723?hl=en

blfr• 11 years ago

The logged-out page will presumably include the tweet shown in the search results in addition to ads and the sign-up nudge/nag.

will_brown• 11 years ago

This was actually my first thought...Google users clicking a result and not seeing the tweet? Twitter wanting to capture users, but making a users first impression of the service as a bait(content) and switch(create account) right from Google results?

Maybe the way its executed it won't be a big deal. Maybe the entire tweet is available in the Google results, or the log in screen will not obscure the tweet. As to the cloaking issue, Google is entering a "partnership" so Twitter is not subject to the standard rules.

bobbles• 11 years ago

Well if 100% of the content of the tweet is listed as a search result, are you losing anything without having a twitter account?

firebones• 11 years ago

You'd lose the thread of @replies and conversation, and perhaps any embedded media in the tweet. You still wouldn't need an account, but you'd have to visit the site.

Pxtl• 11 years ago

I've found twitter is a terrible company for this - I get booted to a twitter login screen for way too many Twitter links online on my phone. Ironically I actually use the twitter app, I'm just not logged in in the web browser.

plorg• 11 years ago

I do not have a Twitter account, and even had I one my browser clears cookies every session. The current setup presents a page takeover login/register prompt on pretty much every inbound link (e.g. if one clicks on a link to an individual tweet from a news story or Facebook ). Contrary to the company's apparent strategy, this actually makes joining the service less desirous for me.

aragot• 11 years ago

I think the earthshaking point of the agreement is: Reputation.

With Twitter info, Google will be able to determine who are the leaders in the world. As the founder of a small, bootstrapped product, I know that my competitors are able to leverage way more followers because they're large service companies with small products. I've benefited from good rankings on Google due to several factors that didn't depend on the size of my audience, such as doing my Q&A in public (on Atlassian Answers). If Google leverages Twitter's social graph, it will probably give a preference to the pages of the bigger company with more followers.

Which is "a good thing" in the grand scheme of economics: People trust more the software of big companies than small ones, whether I like that or not.

whatcd• 11 years ago

Looks like I don't have to use search.twitter.com to get the latest.

Win-Win for both companies!

CreativePro• 11 years ago

now if they only removed google plus from youtube

taybin• 11 years ago

Ugh. I avoid twitter like the plague already. Luckily it'll be easy to ignore in the results.

guelo• 11 years ago

During the Gaza war last summer Israel propaganda figured out how to get their inflamatory Google+ content below every Gaza news story. I wonder how Twitter will be different. Who picks the highlighted tweets?

simula67• 11 years ago

I remember Google had this deal before and they chose to end it [1] around the time it launched Google+. Seems like they have thrown in the towel on social :)

[1] http://searchengineland.com/as-deal-with-twitter-expires-goo...

ars• 11 years ago

Seems like they have thrown in the towel on social :)

They shouldn't. Anecdotally I've found that young kids seem to prefer google+ over facebook.

Mainly because you can control exactly who you share what with by using circles, and because parents are uneasy about letting kids go on social media (facebook), but email is an easier sell (gmail) and once you have gmail google+ is not far away.

jzwinck• 11 years ago

The quote at the end is almost certainly taken out of context:

We found that 89% of Twitter users are cricket fans, they follow cricket in some way—either they follow sports, people or teams.

That came from someone in India, who surely was referring to Twitter users in India. Globally, I doubt 89% of Twitter users could name a single cricket player, team, event, venue, or rule.

It's interesting how authoritative-sounding people (here, the "managing director for Twitter") can have their words used in ways that are definitely not true yet appear on the surface to be sensible.

caseyf7• 11 years ago

Although it may be due to the incredibly high number of fake Twitter accounts generated in India.

known• 11 years ago

Does Google have a similar deal with Amazon?

Twitter Confirms New Google Firehose Deal

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