Slashdot Mirror
Tweets To Appear In Google Search Results
mpicpp writes with news that Google will now begin showing tweets alongside search results. Mobile users searching via the Android/iOS apps or through the browser will start seeing the tweets immediately, while the desktop version is "coming shortly." The tweets will only be available for the searches in English to start, but Twitter says they'll be adding more languages soon.
From the context of the rest of the conversation I can almost always figure out what a stupid Slashdot comment meant.
OTOH, tweets are virtually impossible for me to parse, because everyone's using lots of pronouns to stay under 140 characters, and "twitter threads" really don't show me "ok this guy was responding to this tweet, which was a response to that tweet, which was a response to something that chick said, so the 'she' in this last tweet is probably that chick..."
For example, every time I go to Fivethirtyeight.com there's a list of tweets the Fivethirtyeight authors are making. I can generally figure out what half of them mean. Today it's up to 3/4 or so, because Enten just sent out a barrage of 6 on the same topic and one of them said "this is the topic I am talking about," rather then the twitter-user's traditional reliance on everyone knowing precisely what they're talking about right now, and therefore not including any context becsides a timestamp and the twitter handles of the people they're interacting with.
This will probably be incredibly useful for a small set of users (ie: twitter addicts who get the lingo; marketers figuring out everything said about their boss, etc.) and be completely useless for damn near anyone else.