Today I woke up and immediately lots of tweets and news about the just launched BingTweets service filled up my Twitter stream on my BlackBerry client. This news caught my attention since all the effort my company put in the past few months in our rank-based realtime Twitter search engine Tweefind.
That being said, I immediately gave BingTweets a try and realized how misleading all the news (better, the headlines) I read in the morning actually were. BingTweets is not really a Twitter search engine, but rather a mashup of Bing plus a box with Twitter trending topics plus a sidebar where all the “noise” about the searched keyword appear. In a nutshell, something any 20 years old programmer can easily do in two days (maybe less) of coding.
So, where is the value for the final user? If you test it with some pretty common search keywords like iphone, twitter, facebook etc. you will immediately realize that the left sidebar gets filled up with everything but useful and relevant tweets. Everything related to that keywork appears, no filters, nothing. Signal to noise ratio is very, very low, as low as the value delivered to users.
On the contrary, what we did on Tweefind is exactly the opposite. We developed an algorithm working 24/7 that removes noise from the twitter stream and shows relevant tweets only, coming from users with the highest ranks. And you can switch to Bing results anytime. Google taught us that it was a winning choice for web searches, so why not? You can find more details on how it works in this presentation.
Yesterday we released an even more efficient version that gets updated every 15 second and in case new tweets from higher-ranked users appear, we replace the previous ones with the new, higher-ranked ones. More in my post where I announced the new version.
Ok, I know you would say I’m colored here. This could be actually true, but faithful readers know very well that I usually write what I think and, Tweefind or not, my thoughts would remain the same and anyone with a good knowledge of this space would easily agree with me.
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