More than 140 characters Tweet – Emarketeur’s Blog

There was some buzz, lately, around the dilemma : “is Twitter a search engine ?“. I don’t know if you have gave your opinion, yet, but for me Twitter is more an RSS Feed than a search engine. And, if there are more people sharing my point of view, then Twitter will compete with Google Reader and not with Google Search.

Twitter as a filtered RSS Feed

I use Google Reader and Brief (the Firefox add-on) to manage my feeds ; the fact is that I receive hundreds of feeds each day, just like you I guess , and I can’t read them all, but hopefully I found a solution to select witch ones I should look at  first. This solution is nothing else but Twitter !!!

Nowadays, many e-zines, news sites and leading bloggers have a Twitter account. I don’t think that they will tweet all of their headlines, that’s not wise because it’s too interruptive, instead, they will tweet the most relevant and exclusive ones. So if you follow them on Twitter you will get the filtered news and you will save your time.

Also, I hope that you follow people who share the same fields of your interests and not some random guys because they follow you, and may be by using an auto-follow program. Even if you are selective in following people, you can’t read all the tweets when the number is important, so you should be more selective by creating groups on Tweetdeck, by what you want to listen to. That’s how you can reduce some noise and get only the signals. One of the criteria that I take into account before I follow a tweep is the links that he/she posts in his/her tweets. Why is this so important ? Because every link is a recommendation and better be a useful one since I’m looking for filtered feeds ; I’m looking for signals and so do you ! Come on seriously, you and your tweeps, you end up with the same feeds in Google Reader…I mean if you have chosen your followings very carefully. When I go and check out Twitter, first, I know what articles I should begin with to keep up with my industry, articles that my tweeps think are interesting, content that they read and appreciated enough to  recommend them to their friends and followers. This way it saves me time.

On twitter, you should give too, so how ? By retweeting, you will recommend on your turn useful and relevant content, and if you find two RTs in a tweet containing a link, than the content is filtered Twice. The problem here is you’ll haven’t enough characters to RT again…  Also, you may follow @retweetist. The  fact that I consider Twitter as an RSS Feed don’t keep me away from checking out my Google reader, at least for now. I said may be if I dig into Google reader, I will find other useful content to share with the community and that no one has looked at or recommended it, yet. That’s why I should update my list by adding new feeds. So if Twitter increases your monitoring productivity, Google Reader will distinguish your tweets and increase your influence. The thing is that I always start by reading what my friends have read, appreciated and than recommended.

I’m curious about your opinion : ” will Twitter replace these Google Services (Search and Reader) ?”. So I will appreciate, if you take the poll and/or leave a comment, I always listen to what you say .

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