Google Can Do Anything, Why Can’t It Make A Twitter?

Google knows what it’s good at. Like any smart company, they focus on what they’re good at and strategically outsource the rest. They also know that there are areas where other companies outperform them or develop technology faster then they can. They’ve done it before. (And they’ve also tried to make a Twitter with their failed service Jaiku, which was also originally a Finnish startup acquired in 2007)

Let’s take a look at a short list of things Google bought:

• Video: YouTube was acquired by Google in November 2006 for $1.65 billion
• VOIP: Google Voice was born as Grand Central, and acquired in July 2007 for $95 million
• RSS Management: FeedBurner was a June 2007 acquisition for somewhere in the neighbourhood of $100 million
• Email Security: Postini was an important purchase to help GMail have a hope of becoming a useful enterprise email solution as a part of Google Apps. The price-tag was $625 million.
• Aerial Image Capture: ImageAmerica specialized in high resolution photos and used a propretary technology to correct distortions and make it more suitable for mapping. Google acquired it in July 2007.

And don’t forget about Blogger, the 1999 startup by Pyra Labs and co-founded by Evan Williams, now with Twitter. Google has a strong record of buying technology where it hasn’t yet created the in-house expertise.

What Would Acquiring Twitter Mean?

We’ve seen a common theme amongst algorithm updates over the last few years, pushing for more timely, yet relevant results. Twitter Search takes that equation and goes almost as far to one side as possible….as timely as possible. But what they’ve discovered out of that is that freshness tends to create relevance which matches the intent of many queries. The use of hashtags for event or group based tweets seems to take care of the rest of it. The issue with these results is that the relevancy only exists while they’re under the umbrella of Twitter. It’s a single tool, and Twitter-style results on as large an index as Google holds would be chaos.

What Google wants out of Twitter is more likely a combination of data, technology and a testing framework. Google wants to understand the intent behind the query, and freshness is an exceptionally difficult variable to test. We’ve seen various SERP changes and algorithm updates which push various ‘fresh’ elements into the results: blog results, news, and even Twitter profiles and status updates. What Twitter has is a ready-built window into millions of queries with freshness built in. Google wants to learn more.

Google also wants to help keep Facebook down, and encourage competition in the marketplace. Part of what helps Google dominate is the fact that habitual use of Google as our entrypoint for the internet has been wired into our brain. If Facebook looks to be threatening Google’s place as our start page, then it makes competitive sense to work with the next largest competitor likely competitor.

I don’t think Google’s efforts to eschew possible anti-trust action would be helped by acquiring one of the fastest growing online properties. With Chrome growing market share, the Yahoo ad-deal and no reason to suspect Google’s market share of core search will drop any time soon, they can’t afford to dominate many more online arenas without making some serious efforts to encourage competition.

For Twitter, a partnership would mean resources beyond another few hundred million. It’d mean research support, technical support and publicity. It would make raising further funding easier, help with development of a true revenue model and guidance to help move beyond tech-savvy people in North America.

I don’t see Google acquiring Twitter. It’s too risky from an anti-trust standpoint, and would discourage more true competition in the market. Twitter doesn’t really want to be bought, as least not yet. And I think the biggest synergy will come from a strong partnership. At the very least, Google will benefit by using the information to improve it’s search results, and Twitter will benefit in terms of capital (human and monetary) and a quiet helping hand in the competitive landscape.


Copyright 2008 - Enquiro Search Solutions.