It isn’t just Google that missed the real-time web #mbc09
People are talking about Microblogging Conference 09, which has been billed as “the very first microblogging conference in Europe where professionals and enthusiasts in the scene will get together.”
Bet there is nothing about the event on Google’s news page, its blog page, or even Google Hot Trends. It’s the same non-story at Yahoo, Yahoo News and Yahoo Buzz.
So how does this native Californian claim to know that people are talking about an event in Germany? Well, TwitScoop tells me so:
“mbc09″ is the hashtag being used on Twitter to mark messages related to the microblogging conference. That tag is one of the top “trending topics” over at Twitter Search:
And Twemes lists “-mbc09″ as the first word in its “tweme cloud”:
It’s on the front of Hashtags.org too, along with a nifty mini-graph showing its popularity:
This is another example of Google not capturing the “real-time web“. But it’s not evidence that “Google cannot be real-time,” as Bernard Lunn said last week. But I’ll save that for another post.
Is it that Yahoo and Google are bad at tracking Twitter? No. A quick visit to Twitturly and Twitturls and Tweetmeme — three tools that track what people are linking to from Twitter — also showed nothing related to the conference. Even tweetnews, the promising BOSS + Twitter application that Lunn referred to, returned no results when I ran a quick search for mbc09.
Why did all of these powerful tools miss the micro-buzz? Well, regardless of the name of this blog, it’s not always about the almighty link.
When an event starts — or news breaks — there is no “content” to link to and so services that analyze only URLs cannot be real-time.
Twitter has shown us that “content” doesn’t necessarily come in the form of a complete HTML web page. It can sometimes be delivered in quick bursts of text.
Then again, doesn’t each tweet have its own web page that can be indexed? Oh yeah, I said that will be another post.
Linked to from this post:
- MBC09
- MBC09 – The Microblogging Conference 09 in Hamburg, Germany, blog post
- Plane crash in NYC captured on real-time web, blog post by Robert Scoble
- Sorry Google, You Missed the Real-Time Web!, blog post by Bernard Lunn
- Why use #inaug09, or any other hashtag, blog post by me
- Google: news, blog search, Hot Trends
- Yahoo: main site, news, Yahoo Buzz.
- Twitter tools: TwitScoop, Twitter Search, Twemes, Hashtags.org, Twitturly, Twitturls, Tweetmeme, tweetnews
- One tweet, by me
December 29th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Great post! I?m just starting out in community management/marketing media and trying to learn how to do it well – resources like this article are incredibly helpful. As our company is based in the US, it?s all a bit new to us. The example above is something that I worry about as well, how to show your own genuine enthusiasm and share the fact that your product is useful in that case