Google on Twitter

["Joseph Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

I have been receiving offline messages to the effect of "why in 
the world do you think brain-dead social communities like Twitter 
have a role to play in scholarly communications?"  Here is an 
interesting comment on Twitter from Larry Page, cofounder of 
Google (and inventor of the PageRank algorithm):

"Page says that Twitter has demonstrated that real time search is 
essential. Loic Le Meur, founder of microblogging service Seesmic 
and European tech conference Le Web (where this year's topic is 
the real time web), asked Page today what he thought about 
Twitter. Page's response was interesting.

"'I have always thought we needed to index the web every second 
to allow real time search," Le Meur quotes Page as saying. "At 
first, my team laughed and did not believe me. With Twitter, now 
they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second 
indexing but people are getting pretty excited about realtime.'"

Full piece in ReadWriteWeb is here:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/larry_page_on_real_time_google_we_have_to_do_it.php

Joe Esposito