A recent post over on VentureBeat on who wins, who loses in the Twitter/Google deal attempted to analyze the Twitter/Google deal to make sense of it. In the deal, Google is allowed to index all tweets and Twitter gets revenue in addition to more traffic from Google. According to the author, Google is getting really valuable time-sensitive content to put ads against which will help it super-serve its users and, as such, acquires a real-time pulse of the world because Twitter remains the only place you can connect with smart, influential people on things you care about.
At this point SI has to say WTF? While there are some smart, influential people on Twitter, there are a number of fallacies to this statement. First of all, not every smart, influential person is on Twitter. Not even close. And many of the smartest, most influential people on Twitter barely tweet, and if they do, due to the 140 character limit, they aren’t saying much. Secondly, what kind of idiot do you have to be to believe that Twitter remains the only place you can connect with smart, influential people? Not only are Facebook and LinkedIn still mega-big (unlike Google Plus), but there is one location that trumps them all when it comes to connecting with smart, influential people. The Real World. (And not the MTV show. I mean offline where you’ve been able to, in the right forums, find smart, influential people for tens of thousands of years.)
As a result, since SI assumes that any conclusions made by the author are all hogwash as the assumptions from the get-go are wrong, SI is going to tell you who really wins, who really loses — and why.
Biggest Winner: Sentiment Analysis Companies
Social media marketers have corporate marketers convinced social media marketing and, more importantly, social media reputation is the most important thing and that these corporate marketers have to track that daily. And how are these corporate marketers supposed to do this? By way of sentiment analysis which can, of course, only be done by web-scouring sentiment analysis software offered by a handful of companies. And once they can get real-time data through Google, their analysis will, of course, be more current and relative than ever (and, as such, their prices will justifiably go up). Or at least that’s what they’ll claim.
Next Biggest Winner: Twitter
Twitter has struggled to monetize it’s network since the beginning. A regular, big, check from Google is a really good thing. First of all, it’s money in the bank. Secondly, in Twitter’s view, it’s verification to investors that it is the social network of choice because Google has deemed it worthy of payment for its data. And it’s likely that its investors will believe this spin, praise Twitter’s executive team, and continue to support its growth.
Biggest Loser: US!
When we do a search, Google will now be inundating us with useless Tweets in our search result. Twitter decreases our IQ and makes a twit out of all of us (proof). Twitter may even be downfall of the western world. (There’s a reason why SI hails the fail whale.) At the end of the day, we all lose.