Google integrated its Blogger Following feature with Google Friend Connect this week, but the search giant put a damper on its own launch by signing up for a Twitter account. Google began Tweeting Wednesday evening. Its first post was strings of 0’s and 1’s, binary code for “I feel good.”
But Google’s second post may be the company’s real motive for launching on Twitter. Google tweeted this message 20 minutes later: “Check out the new Google Apps Status Dashboard.” After a data-center fiasco earlier this week that put Gmail out of commission for a couple of hours, Google has moved to be more transparent. The dashboard is one move, and Twitter is the other.
The YouTube of Real-Time Search
Google’s Twitter tells the story: “News and updates from Google.” In less than three days, Google has attracted nearly 28,000 followers. It has posted 100 updates, mostly surrounding its products. There are tweets about Google Toolbar, Google Friend Connect, and Google Translate.
Google may be late to the Twitter party, and its sudden entrance has many speculating about whether it plans to purchase the micro-blogging service that allows 140 characters to tell people what you’re doing. If it’s more search assets Google is after, Twitter would be a prime candidate.
John Battelle, author of The Search, called real-time, conversational search the most important and quickly growing form of Web search today. Then he called Twitter the YouTube of real-time search. If Google bought Twitter, it wouldn’t be the first company it acquired from Twitter cofounders Evan Williams and Biz Stone. Google bought Blogger from the duo.
“YouTube was the single fastest-growing new form of search on the Web, and Google 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…