How will Twitter change search and the mainstream media?

Since the tragic passing of Michael Jackson, the internet has been rife with stories proclaiming how social media broke the news first, and how traditional news outlets and search engines lagged behind. This social media back-patting has resulted in plenty of insults being thrown at everyone who isn’t Twitter.

I’m a Twitter user and a Twitter fan, and lets think for a minute about what it has added to our online lives:

• Its an alerts service – when news breaks, we often see it on Twitter before we see it in RSS feeds, on news sites, on other social sites or on search engines.
• Its a guage of community feeling – we don’t just get facts from Twitter, we get emotions from a large number of people, showing the general spirit of feeling around an event.
• Its about personal experiences – we get to hear the personal stories that we wouldn’t hear from the news sites.

Those three points are impressive, and something Twitter and its community can be extremely proud of. But do these make Twitter a competitor to existing services like search and traditional media, or are these benefits merely complimentary? I believe its somewhere in the middle.

The Mainstream Media

Lets look first at the mainstream media. What do they have to fear from Twitter?

• Will people stop reading news? Absolutely not. I’m not sure I know anyone who, on seeing the Michael Jackson story break on Twitter, didn’t go to their favourite news site(s) and try to verify the information. When they found it was yet unconfirmed, I think most of us still held on to a glimmer of hope that maybe it wasn’t true – it was only when the mainstream news confirmed Michael Jackson’s death that we all finally believed it. And many of us spent plenty of time today browsing obituaries or photo archives on the mainstream media sites. Twitter is an unverified source of information, and although the mainstream media makes plenty of mistakes, its still considered a more reputable source of information than @someguysomewhereelse.
• Will stop people reading news commentary? Possibly, a little. I think that as we get more information on the “general zeitgeist” from social services like Twitter we’ll have less and less need to rely on some columnists opinion to reaffirm and develop our own ideas.
• Will and should mainstream media change? Hopefully mainstream media will become less about entertainment and commentary, and much more about verifiable facts and information, which is what it was for originally. Now that we have the tools, lets leave the gossiping to the people, and turn our news organisations into something we can truly trust. In some ways, to achieve this goal I’d rather our news organisations were less worried about being first to break the news, but more about being the most accurate and trustworthy.

The Search Engines

So what about search? What do search engines have to fear from the mighty Twitter?

• Will people stop searching on search engines? Absolutely not. Unless Twitter uses its database of links to build a Google-like search engine powered by a “social pagerank”, Twitter in its current form will not have any impact on the core search terms in the search engines.
• Will people stop searching for breaking news on search engines? The key question here is, have they ever? I don’t think that people automatically go to Google to find out the latest news. So I don’t think Google will lose share there.
• Will the search engines have to change? Yes, but I think that Twitter is an opportunity for search engines, rather than a threat. Twitter provides a highly indexable, highly relevant and fairly easy-to-interpret flow of information. I can imagine a day in the near future where searches on Google for Twitter’s trending topics appear with a link at the top saying “45,534 social mentions in the last hour – view all.”. Clicking on the link will take users through to a nice search results page amalgamating social results from a whole load of social sources such as Twitter, with Adwords ads down the side. The result? Google just monetised Twitter AND people start searching Google for breaking news: win win for Google.

In Conclusion

So yes, I think that Twitter will change the way search engines and (especially) mainstream media do business, but I don’t think it will do the damage that some are expecting. We still need both of them, and they both have a role in the world, they just need to adapt to our new expectations. Search engines will do this easily and in the very near future. Mainstream media will kick and scream like the record industry has been for the past few years until they realise that its not evil people doing this to them but their own customers. Then they’ll either adapt and survive or they’ll stagnate and die, but somewhere from that chaos an “iTunes” of the media world will rise that will revolutionise their model and make it something more suitable for the 21st Century Web 2.0 world.