Some of the news feeds I subscribe to today are all abuzz with the news that both Microsoft and Google are now going to include Twitter and some other social media outlets in their search. This is good news?
Isn’t that kind of like Headline News announcing that they’re going to include the random jabberings of any teenager off the street? Wait… do they do that now?
Don’t get me wrong. I think Twitter is neat and I tweet regularly about stuff that is going on in my life, but that’s just the thing. Whatever I am posting is guaranteed to be Jim-centric to the detriment of whatever other nouns make it into my update.
If I tweet about fanny packs, it’s because I am putting one on and letting people know that I look like a dork right now. If you’re searching for fanny pack information, you probably don’t care if I am wearing one or how it affects my carefully sculpted image.
This is also why clicking on “Trending topics” on the right hand bar of Twitter’s interface is mostly a mistake. The law of averages dictates that at least some of those should contain real insight, but I have yet to see any. It feels to me as though I’ve stumbled into a conversation among teenagers at a mall food court.
Looking at the current trending topic on Balloon Boy, it consists of a bunch of copies of the same tweet making a joke about the trending topic on the rumor that Kanye passed away. One can only wonder why Google and Bing haven’t allowed us to search this gold mine sooner, or as I am calling them from now on when speaking of them collectively, “Bingle”.
It has a nice ring to it, I feel, even though I suspect Bing won’t really be with us for long.
