Real Time Is Real Time, Today Or Last Year

Image via CrunchBase

Time 1937: Richest man In The World.

Look at this article from Time 1937. The richest man in the world at the time was an Indian. Hello Bill Gates. It was empowering to get to read the article in the raw. I think this is the model I have in mind when it comes to Twitter. What is being said right now in real time is important. But the Twitter archives are also important.

And finally I got it.

I knew Google needed to step in.

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Twitter Should Hand Over Search To Google

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CNet: Google Launches Twitter Timeline Search

This is not Twitter giving the farm away. This is Twitter bringing in Google to enhance the value of every single tweet. Suddenly every tweet in the Twitter archive has become worth so much more. This is a huge boost to Twitter's monetization efforts. (Twitter Does The Deed: Ads)

Being able to search every tweet ever is great. But there is one missing link: visualization. Tweets are not meant to be read one at a time. And visualization is perhaps the best way to read many tweets at once. Google has work cut out for it in the presentation department. Searching through tweets is not the same as searching through webpages. Tweets are a different animal.

Twitter Visualization: Reading Many Tweets At Once

What I say today about Obama's victory in November 2008 is a different animal from what I said about Obama's victory as it happened. It is still me saying it, but real time is a different dimension.

This ability to dig through the Twitter archives is going to be a great tool for many players to go out there and see what people are saying about them, or how what they have been saying has changed over time.

Right now the archives go back only to February. It has to go all the way back. And Google has not even started work on doing the best possible job on presentation. Don't treat tweets like they are webpages. They are not.

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Why Will Facebook Itself Not Do Facebook Enterprise?

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Fred Wilson: Software Is Media

Why will Facebook itself not do Facebook Enterprise? That is a question I have asked a few different times. The Salesforce guy had a guest post in TechCrunch not long back. A friend of mine emailed me that post through Google Reader. (Ignite, Set It On Fire) And I posed him the question on Buzz. Why will Facebook itself not do Facebook Enterprise?

The dichotomy between consumer software and enterprise software is vapid. It is unreal. It is an inconvenience that ought not last too long.

In his post today Fred Wilson is making the point that software should be as easy to use as media. He has not quite spelled it out, but I don't think he is trying to say he is only talking about consumer software. Software should be as easy to use as media also applies to enterprise software.

Salesforce trying to imitate Facebook to offer enterprise software: is that better than Facebook itself offering an enterprise version of itself? I don't think so.

The inbox was not copyrighted by Hotmail. The status update has not been copyrighted by Twitter. Similarly the stream is not Facebook property. Check in is similarly going to be a commodity feature.

Twitter should offer a Twitter Enterprise, and Facebook should work on a Facebook Enterprise. It just makes sense.

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Twitter Has To Scale The Signals

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If I have five friends, and all of them are on Facebook and all of them have my number, and we party every other week, we are talking. But what if I have 500 friends? What if I have five friends and 5,000 fans? What if I have two friends and 20,000 online contacts? What if I am being followed by 50,000 people? What if I end up with five million followers?

Twitter has to make sure that at no point do the signals turn into noise for me. At no point should I get overwhelmed. I might have 500,000 followers, and if all of them tweet me, I should still be able to hear what they are saying. (Twitter Visualization: Reading Many Tweets At Once)

The power users will tell you, if you really want to make the best of Twitter, you got to wade into the ecosystem and find all the right apps for you. I am cool with that suggestion, but Twitter should not be. If Twitter envisions a billion users, as it should (Goal: A Billion People On Twitter April 2009) - heck, I think Twitter could beat Facebook to that magic number, but not the Twitter of today - then Twitter has to make sure all the action is at Twitter.com. Twitter bought Summize, Twitter bought Tweetie, it could easily buy 20 more such companies today. Buy or build, buy or build, buy or build.

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