Yesterday Google began its rollout of its Realtime search offering. While You could send some precious time reading my description of the service let's let the folks from Google tell you instead.
The idea is to give people one place to find timely information about an earthquake or other major event that just happened, said Dylan Casey, a product manager at Google.
Google has added a location tool that can zero in on a specific geographic area so you can see tweets near you. Google also gives the option of a conversation view so that you can follow the responses to tweets without having to click through a bunch of links. The tweets are organized from oldest to newest.
Interesting yes but from a marketing perspective how can this be applied?
Casey said he has already found the product very useful: He has been using the real-time search page to get instant feedback on the rollout.
Searchers can either get alerts sent to them or they can see the entire conversation around whatever it is they are interested in.
It's going to take some time to truly hash out the worth of this kind of information. If Twitter can get unwieldy all by itself just how much clarity can be brought to something when you dogpile all Internet data options into one place? People can only handle so much data and the idea of putting 10 lbs of stuff in a 5 lb bag is just about proving it can be done rather than doing it as a benefit to users. We'll see. Either way I sure hope Google can get a foothold before Facebook trademarks all the words in realtime search.
In the meantime, I am much more interested in Google's Gmail phone service. That's easy to digest and saves some scratch as well.
What about you?