That is the question.
So John Batelle has made some predictions about the future of Twitter… He argues, and I agree that Google may soon try to acquire Twitter, because of it’s most valuable asset: a huge network of people generating live updates and how this is important to have if you want to dominate the real time search area.
He also argues that Twitter is in a position where they can refuse offers as they already did with Facebook, so this potential buying offer from Google would be some ridiculous amount of money, much like what happened with Youtube.
The problem is, Google does not need to spend any money on Twitter to have real time conversational search. All it takes to have tweets figuring out on search results is for Google to start indexing Twitter by doing a “little evil”, which means ignore their robots.txt file and maybe the nofollow attributes too.
From Twitter’s robot.txt:
# Every bot that might possibly read and respect this file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*/with_friends
So, the way I see it Google has 2 options: A- play it cool and come to a deal with Twitter either by acquiring it or through some other kind of partnership, and B- forget it and crawl it anyways, like they did with book search and street maps, after all they are a search company and can worry about potential legal consequences later :)
One way or another, it will be interesting to see what it will gonna be, and the price tags involved.
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