
Twitter Confirms New Google Firehose Deal - will_brown
http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/05/twitter-confirms-new-google-firehose-deal-to-distribute-traffic-to-logged-out-users/
======
rrggrr
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.

~~~
austenallred
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](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.

~~~
sparkzilla
>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](http://newslines.org)) so the idea of a hot news
acquisition market is all to the good.

~~~
austenallred
It tells you he space is heating up, and companies are finding breaking news
data valuable.

And to be clear: We don't compete with Twitter - we're a layer of data on top
of the raw twitter/youtube/etc data that makes them more valuable. Infobitt
and Inside.com are vaguely in the breaking news space, but that's about as far
as the similarities go.

~~~
sillysaurus3
_It tells you he space is heating up, and companies are finding breaking news
data valuable._

I don't understand how that conclusion follows. There were many teams created
to deliver pet food at one point, along with many other types of activities
that are no longer relevant. Popularity doesn't seem to be a good proxy for
long-term relevance. If it were, an investor's job would be easy.

The reason I'm skeptical breaking news is valuable is because the value of
information itself is declining over time. The more accessible information
becomes, the less one can charge for it.

Newspapers were valuable because they controlled a channel, not (only) because
they delivered information. The current models will have to follow suit,
otherwise they won't be profitable. And an information channel controlled by
one or two entities is a pretty grim prospect.

~~~
austenallred
The fact there's a Google News Labs team is only one of the many points I have
to conclude that the space is heating up, so maybe that's not fair. But it's
definitely (almost tangibly) different than it was even a six months ago. The
level of interest in the space compared to last year is seriously something
along the lines of 10x. Two years ago nobody cared.

As far as newspapers go, you're right - the important thing is controlling the
channel. Google, FB, and Twitter all want to control that channel, but they
need the data in order to do so. Reliable, verified breaking news data is much
harder to come by than one would think, especially at scale.

~~~
sillysaurus3
That's very interesting. What are some of the problems with getting reliable
news data at scale? And what's the value of getting it? Specifically, how will
you make money?

Sorry for the prying questions. I'm not dismissing. Just the opposite: I'm
quite interested to see whether it could work.

~~~
austenallred
Knowing (or rather finding) content that is important/reliable (signal:noise
ratio), and knowing what content is accurate.

~~~
sillysaurus3
What's the value?

I understand companies might pay for access to that, but why? When most people
get their news from Reddit, and when techies get their news from HN, what's
left? It seems hard to beat a community of upvotes.

To phrase it more precisely, why is access to news within 60 seconds more
valuable than access within 20 minutes? Are stock traders going to be the
customer, or who? There doesn't seem to be a way to deploy advertising with
this, so it's hard to understand why it will make money.

Is the goal to sell this to TV stations who then show ads after they tell
people about breaking news?

~~~
austenallred
> When most people get their news from Reddit, and when techies get their news
> from HN

"Most people" have never heard of Reddit or HN.

The difference isn't 60 seconds vs. 20 minutes; it's <=20 minutes vs 6 hours.
Do a Google News search for a breaking news event and for a few hours you only
find yesterday's articles.

~~~
vinceguidry
Most techies have never heard of HN. Maybe 10 percent of them I meet have
heard of it, almost none of them actually use it.

~~~
maxerickson
What do they think of your extensive personal interest interviews?

~~~
vinceguidry
It's called having conversations. You should try it sometime.

~~~
maxerickson
I think your irritation is justified, it would have been better to not make
that comment. Sorry.

------
nubbee
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](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604723?hl=en)

~~~
bobbles
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
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.

------
jarcoal
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.

~~~
myko
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
.. 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.

~~~
ramidarigaz
Worst case, I bet someone will make a chrome plugin to purge twitter results
from search.

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

------
simula67
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...](http://searchengineland.com/as-deal-with-twitter-expires-google-
realtime-search-goes-offline-84175)

~~~
ars
> 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.

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

Win-Win for both companies!

~~~
CreativePro
now if they only removed google plus from youtube

------
known
Does Google have a similar deal with Amazon?

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

------
guelo
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?

