That crash you heard today was the real-time data door slamming shut on Facebook, Microsoft, etc. Say what you might about Twitter's slowing growth, but mainstream news cycles and breaking news are increasingly preceded by and/or quote tweets. Where are Google's competitors going to turn to deliver similar real time results? PR Newswire? Associated Press? Reuters? Huge win for Google who needed this and big oversight on the part of Facebook IMHO.
I don't follow your logic. I didn't see anything in the story that indicated that the deal was exclusive.
Twitter certainly wouldn't want it to be - they're trying to increase reach. In theory, I can see how Google might want the advantage of an exclusive data source. However, in practice I suspect Google thinks they can get enough of an advantage from using Twitter's firehose better than their competitors do, especially since paying extra to get Twitter to lock out competitors would invite even more antitrust scrutiny.
With the Google/Twitter firehose deal, Google's competitors have lost a potential advantage, but that doesn't mean they've picked up a corresponding disadvantage.
I talk with the Google News Labs team on occasion (it's a brand new team, which should tell you something), and I can safely say there's a race going on in real time news (My company is building a real-time crowdsourced newsroom - https://grasswire.com). My guess is there will be some major acquisitions taking place in the real-time news space this year. Facebook, Microsoft and Google are all realizing it's going to be a landgrab. If nothing else it's fun and exciting.
>it's a brand new team, which should tell you something
What does that tell you? I'm not sure if it's good or bad.
Having seen a few attempts at crowdsourced newsrooms (infobitt, Inside.com, the earlier version of Grasswire) I don't see how they compete with Twitter. At best they filter Twitter and are in competition with Google News. That said, I'm also in that space with Newslines a crowdsourced news archive (http://newslines.org) so the idea of a hot news acquisition market is all to the good.
It tells you he space is heating up, and companies are finding breaking news data valuable.
And to be clear: We don't compete with Twitter - we're a layer of data on top of the raw twitter/youtube/etc data that makes them more valuable. Infobitt and Inside.com are vaguely in the breaking news space, but that's about as far as the similarities go.
It tells you he space is heating up, and companies are finding breaking news data valuable.
I don't understand how that conclusion follows. There were many teams created to deliver pet food at one point, along with many other types of activities that are no longer relevant. Popularity doesn't seem to be a good proxy for long-term relevance. If it were, an investor's job would be easy.
The reason I'm skeptical breaking news is valuable is because the value of information itself is declining over time. The more accessible information becomes, the less one can charge for it.
Newspapers were valuable because they controlled a channel, not (only) because they delivered information. The current models will have to follow suit, otherwise they won't be profitable. And an information channel controlled by one or two entities is a pretty grim prospect.
The fact there's a Google News Labs team is only one of the many points I have to conclude that the space is heating up, so maybe that's not fair. But it's definitely (almost tangibly) different than it was even a six months ago. The level of interest in the space compared to last year is seriously something along the lines of 10x. Two years ago nobody cared.
As far as newspapers go, you're right - the important thing is controlling the channel. Google, FB, and Twitter all want to control that channel, but they need the data in order to do so. Reliable, verified breaking news data is much harder to come by than one would think, especially at scale.
That's very interesting. What are some of the problems with getting reliable news data at scale? And what's the value of getting it? Specifically, how will you make money?
Sorry for the prying questions. I'm not dismissing. Just the opposite: I'm quite interested to see whether it could work.
I understand companies might pay for access to that, but why? When most people get their news from Reddit, and when techies get their news from HN, what's left? It seems hard to beat a community of upvotes.
To phrase it more precisely, why is access to news within 60 seconds more valuable than access within 20 minutes? Are stock traders going to be the customer, or who? There doesn't seem to be a way to deploy advertising with this, so it's hard to understand why it will make money.
Is the goal to sell this to TV stations who then show ads after they tell people about breaking news?
> When most people get their news from Reddit, and when techies get their news from HN
"Most people" have never heard of Reddit or HN.
The difference isn't 60 seconds vs. 20 minutes; it's <=20 minutes vs 6 hours. Do a Google News search for a breaking news event and for a few hours you only find yesterday's articles.
I wonder who would pay for that and why? Since advertisements can't be deployed through such a service, the service will need customers. Are those customers companies, or individuals? Are you going to sell to people involved in the stock market, like day traders? Or what type of customers would find this valuable?
The notion of accuracy being "overrated" in any aspect of news is very troubling to me. Wars are fought, people are killed, and lives are destroyed as a result of inaccurate news.
For some news events up to 30% of the content being shared (and going viral) across social networks is verifiably false. That sways beliefs and opinions and affect lives. To conclude otherwise is completely irresponsible and incredibly dangerous. That's dangerous for society, dangerous for democracy, and... I can't believe I'm actually arguing that inaccurate information being shared as if it were accurate is dangerous.
Hyperbole aside, you are conflating two things: The accuracy of breaking news with the dissemination of that news. Breaking news is very often inaccurate. No amount of fact checking can fix it because in most cases no other news is available to counter the initial report. Unless you have reporters on the ground who can provide a more accurate report, you can't hope to improve that report. When a later report becomes available it becomes the newest report.
Like Infobitt, you appear to be aiming for a metric of quality ("accuracy") that the market doesn't care about that much. Take the recent plane crash in Taiwan as an example. At first it was reported that there were one or two casualties. Later reports said 13 dead. Most people are like "Oh really?" But, even though the first report is less accurate, it has more value to people than the second (unless you have family on the plane).
As for the distribution of news, unless you are Facebook you have no control over how news is shared. In fact, most people don't care about the casualties, they just want to share the video of the plane crashing across the bridge.
News spreads however it's first reported. Sometimes it's corrected later, but often times it's picked up and spread, even by major news organizations. You are assuming that news will eventually be corrected by news organizations. First, that's a false assumption (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8757421), and second, for many it's already too late by that point.
An anecdote of one false rumor not mattering doesn't change the fact that accurate news makes a difference.
I'm actually surprised by your comment. From my personal experience, it's not "up to 30%", it's more like "up to 80%". From lies in headlines[0] that are debunked in main text, to inaccuracies, to agendas, most of the things I see in news are speculation and/or falsehoods.
And yes, it indeed affects lives. It is dangerous for society and democracy. But citizens don't seem to care, and news outlets earn money this way.
I would sincerely like Google hitting news agencies the way they fight spam and SEO. Cut out as much bullshit as possible.
[0] - as an example of a most blatant lie in a headline I've seen, I recall browsing a news site with my mother, when we saw a headline along the lines of "Poland is the poorest country in the EU [by some metric]!". And the main text said more-less: "... except the following 12 countries which are even poorer". I wonder how much damage this kind of decpetion in headlines does. Most people don't read every article, they just skim headlines - so when you put a false claim there, that's what most people are going to remember.
I'm surprised you would discount Infobitt and Inside.com as being "vaguely in the news space" -- they compete almost directly with what you are doing. In its previous form Grasswire seemed to attempt the same thing as Infobitt. Both products have the same idea (repeated on your splash page): filter and fact check breaking news. But perhaps I have missed something?
I've tried using Infobitt a dozen times, and I'm still not sure what its goal is. I think I get it, but I'm trying to understand how it would be useful. No offense to Larry, he's a great guy, I just don't get it yet..
Inside sums up reports from other news sites. It's a content portal, but I don't consider it news per se. That being said, I consider every news site ever a competitor (as is technically every website and app). I just don't preoccupy myself with what they're doing, because (as I hope you'll see in a couple weeks), we're doing something completely different. It's apples and oranges at the end of the day. We're either decidedly different and better or we're dead. The waters are much too muddy for yet-another-news-app.
Ya, I'm actually updating that as we speak. We let in the first groups of users in January, and I've been so focused on the product I almost forgot about the landing page. Thanks!
That depends on who you are. For a very important segment of users, Status Updates == Tweets. Additionally, from the perspective of their followers, it would not be horrifying if those suddenly became more public. In fact, for certain users, that may be preferred.
Social networks are weird to talk about on forums online since everyone has such personal experiences with them. I think that this taints our perspective more than usual, and makes it more difficult to properly assess their real value.
Not to take sides over FB vs TWTR. But, your "absolutely horrifying" could very well be everyone else's "absolute best case".
As a person who has his status updates default to public on purpose, I agree. And yes, it's hard to talk about social networks because there's a very vocal group here insisting that using Facebook = being dumb and/or making selfies and/or being terribly security-unconsciosus. Facebook ecosystem has its problem, but it's also an excellent communication tool.
> but mainstream news cycles and breaking news are increasingly preceded by and/or quote tweets.
That is nothing more than an indication main stream news is no longer reporting the news, but rather quoting gossip, which I don't disagree is the case.
News organizations around the world are facing cost pressures, so rather than pay a specialist to investigate and write articles, it's much cheaper to pay a lesser skilled worker to troll Twitter and copy and paste a few tweets.
But those news organizations are on a race to the bottom.
If people aren't prepared to pay for well research, well written, hard hitting journalistic articles, they are certainly not going to pay for a few copied tweets.
Twitter is going to redirect users to a "logged out" page if they click on a tweet in search results and are not already logged in. How's that not cloaking and against google' own guidelines?[1]
Google wants to index tweets and Twitter wants to nip their growth stagnation in the butt. Two, otherwise fine companies, came to this half-arsed compromise that's solely based on fear of missing out rather than creating something that serves users. Or am I being too harsh here?
I've found twitter is a terrible company for this - I get booted to a twitter login screen for way too many Twitter links online on my phone. Ironically I actually use the twitter app, I'm just not logged in in the web browser.
This was actually my first thought...Google users clicking a result and not seeing the tweet? Twitter wanting to capture users, but making a users first impression of the service as a bait(content) and switch(create account) right from Google results?
Maybe the way its executed it won't be a big deal. Maybe the entire tweet is available in the Google results, or the log in screen will not obscure the tweet. As to the cloaking issue, Google is entering a "partnership" so Twitter is not subject to the standard rules.
I think the earthshaking point of the agreement is: Reputation.
With Twitter info, Google will be able to determine who are the leaders in the world. As the founder of a small, bootstrapped product, I know that my competitors are able to leverage way more followers because they're large service companies with small products. I've benefited from good rankings on Google due to several factors that didn't depend on the size of my audience, such as doing my Q&A in public (on Atlassian Answers). If Google leverages Twitter's social graph, it will probably give a preference to the pages of the bigger company with more followers.
Which is "a good thing" in the grand scheme of economics: People trust more the software of big companies than small ones, whether I like that or not.
I do not have a Twitter account, and even had I one my browser clears cookies every session. The current setup presents a page takeover login/register prompt on pretty much every inbound link (e.g. if one clicks on a link to an individual tweet from a news story or Facebook ). Contrary to the company's apparent strategy, this actually makes joining the service less desirous for me.
You'd lose the thread of @replies and conversation, and perhaps any embedded media in the tweet. You still wouldn't need an account, but you'd have to visit the site.
I feel the complete opposite - I used to Google for specific tweets I remembered seeing and to help find tweets relating to current events. Google was much better about showing me the stuff I wanted to see than the actual Twitter site!
Wonder what is more valuable: showing tweets along the search results or being able to use them to rank other search results?
Especially for stuff that is happening right now, tweets probably contain pretty good information on what are the most relevant sources of information. And since the text part is show short, it is easier to match what this tweet is related to.
Its going to be heavily censored anyway, Twitter has an excessive amount of trolls, harassment and negative tweets in regards to any major social news event. There is no way Google will let that hit the search results.
>I wouldn't mind if somehow it was integrated into Google News; that could be cool.
I've wanted to build a site that mixes news feeds with tweets about said news. Some news sites have weak twitter streams to the side but it would be cool to have something more immersive.
The quote at the end is almost certainly taken out of context:
> We found that 89% of Twitter users are cricket fans, they follow cricket in some way—either they follow sports, people or teams.
That came from someone in India, who surely was referring to Twitter users in India. Globally, I doubt 89% of Twitter users could name a single cricket player, team, event, venue, or rule.
It's interesting how authoritative-sounding people (here, the "managing director for Twitter") can have their words used in ways that are definitely not true yet appear on the surface to be sensible.
I remember Google had this deal before and they chose to end it [1] around the time it launched Google+. Seems like they have thrown in the towel on social :)
> Seems like they have thrown in the towel on social :)
They shouldn't. Anecdotally I've found that young kids seem to prefer google+ over facebook.
Mainly because you can control exactly who you share what with by using circles, and because parents are uneasy about letting kids go on social media (facebook), but email is an easier sell (gmail) and once you have gmail google+ is not far away.
During the Gaza war last summer Israel propaganda figured out how to get their inflamatory Google+ content below every Gaza news story. I wonder how Twitter will be different. Who picks the highlighted tweets?
