Markets

Google News @ Twitter: A Mere Trickle of Tweets

By David Weir

Updated on: June 8, 2009 / 11:59 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

A while back, Google News opened a Twitter account, and after monitoring it for a while, I have to raise the question, "Why?"
It's hard to divine any useful function this tiny little Tweet stream is yet providing to Google, its news partners, or even to Twitter users.

Here, for example, are the (approximate) load times for its most recent Tweets:

One hour ago.
Three hours ago.
Nine hours ago.
Twelve hours ago.
Fourteen hours ago.
Fifteen hours ago.

The stories originated with the following sources: CNN, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters, USA Today, and Fox News (not in that order). All major news sources, to be sure. Not a blog or web-only source anywhere to be seen.

Assuming that algorithms, Google's holy grail, are making the choices of which stories to promote over Twitter, clearly the filters have been set very conservatively. No Huffington Post, no Salon, no Boing Boing. I went over all the updates for the past week and this pattern never varied.

We know that Google's executives have admitted that Twitter is kicking its butt in real-time news delivery. Still, this paltry effort to play news over Twitter is almost comically pathetic. Rather than highlighting Google's ability to aggregate hundreds of news sources about every topic under the sun, the search engine's Twitter stream makes it look like, ahem, one of those poor old guys in the TV ads with "bladder leakage" issues.

Sad. very sad.