The seemingly endless media and industry fawning over Twitter has lead to the widespread debate over the merits of real-time search and the future of the search industry. Yes, Twitter is an amazing service that allows people to share their thoughts, however poignant, painful or pointless, on events as they happen. However, the hype is reaching a fever pitch only exacerbated by Google acquisition rumors. With that in mind, it’s time to try and figure out exactly where this wonderful new medium belongs in the world of search.

It has been suggested that Google is looking to acquire Twitter because it views it as a threat. That line of thinking is completely insane because Google isn’t going anywhere. The company is still the top dog in terms of financial stability, commitment to innovation and business strategy. Depending on what research firm you ask, Google owns roughly 80 percent of the search engine market and is still gobbling up market share. In terms of users, Twitter doesn’t even match Facebook’s potential as a rival. Twitter is simply not a threat to Google; in fact, the search giant could simply consume the Twitter API. The good news is that it probably won’t because Twitter is a piece of the greater problem Google is looking to solve.
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The past year, although troubling and difficult for many people, has been a fascinating period in advertising. It has caused fundamental shifts in the balance of power between traditional and digital shops and, more important, changed the way that most savvy agencies approach marketing. Results are still king, but budgets are becoming more and more scrappy and if that wasn’t challenging enough, the client is standing behind you with a pitchfork just to make sure that you stay on form.

This new marketing climate has businesses and brand teams embracing blogs and open-source content-management system (CMS) platforms to drive their new sites. While this shift is being viewed as a reaction to tough economic times, using tools like Drupal, WordPress, Ping.fm, Twitter, Facebook Pages and others doesn’t have to mean you’re trying to take the cheap route. The fact is that these tools embrace open architectures that have a lot of work (particularly social media integration tools) already built into them.
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Facebook has opened up its activity stream through a new API for developers. Now any developer can create new applications incorporating the real-time stream. One of the first apps to take advantage of this new API is Seesmic Desktop, A Twitter client which is now adding your Facebook feed through this API (something Tweetdeck already did in the past through other more restrictive means). Facebook has also created its own desktop notification client to demonstrate what can be built with the API.

Ethan Beard, Facebook’s director of platform marketing, said that the entire feed will be available through a single API call. A developer could recreate the entire Facebook home page if he wanted to or take parts of the feed and remix it to make something more interesting. For starters, I’d expect most Twitter clients to add the Facebook stream as an additional option. On Tweetdeck, for instance, you can read your activity stream, but you cannot respond in-line. The new Facebook Open Stream API is two-way, so it would allow developers to build apps which allow for that two-way communication inside the app.

This is a big deal. It potentially puts Facebook side by side with Twitter in all of these desktop and mobile client applications where a lot of the real-time conversation is happening and lets it compete head-to-head with Twitter. Whichever conversation stream is more interesting will prevail. [full article]

Last month, Jason Calacanis wrote he’d pay $250,000 to be listed as a Twitter “Suggested Follow” for two years. Getting on Twitter’s “suggested” list can drive hundred of thousands of people to follow a Twitter feed.

Facebook has taken notice, and this weekend has started recommending Facebook fan pages of some public personas and brand on its own site. (Sarah Lacy, Julia Allison, and Mark Cuban have all already made Facebook’s list.)

Nothing wrong with imitation. Nor is it the first time Facebook has looked to Twitter for inspiration.  Facebook’s recent redesign to emphasize real-time updates also took a cue from Twitter.

It seems like Facebooks is doing everything wrong. Facebook v2 totally annihilated any usefulness for Facebook applications… now Facebook v3 totally killed everything else but the stream … it seems like a giant over-elaborated, over-complicated, over-architected, over-scoped Twitter with some minor add-ons no one seem to care about anymore such as photo albums, apps, groups, and fan pages … Personally, I used to login to Facebook every day, now maybe once every week or two… grants, Facebook is still the fastest growing site, stats say that more people login to Facebook every day than people watched the superbowl, some analysis say that Facebook will have more traffic than Google in a few years… but I really want to see if there’s a dropoff in growth rate with the new design … who actually like it?

Coca-Cola Europe launched an interesting project for Sprite earlier this month that I think is worth noting.  “Green Eyed World” is a video series revolving around a 23-year old singer from London as she looks to fulfill her dream of becoming a star. The audience is able to influence her choices as she journey’s through the music world by commenting and voting on the site.

The audience can follow and interact with this 23-year old singer from London as she creates new opportunities for herself by following her dream.  By joining her journey online, the audience can influence her choices through commenting and voting directly in the GREEN EYED WORLD videos using their own Facebook profile.

The interesting twist is that the highly customized YouTube channel doesn’t include the familiar comments that we’re used to using, but only allows users to comment by logging in with their Facebook credentials via Facebook Connect. This function makes each comment act as a seeding element for the campaign across your friend’s list as well as allows you to easily see what your other friend’s have said about the episode.

This use of Facebook Connect stood out to me because it was completely replacing a very familiar commenting system, but I think it works for this branded entertainment campaign. The quality of the video looks solid. The videos views aren’t particularly high yet, but I think this could be very interesting to see how it plays out as it’s too early to see how successful it’s going to be.

The “Episode Zero” show will be immediately followed by several viral extras on YouTube and Facebook updates from Katie leading up to premiere “Episode One” of “Season One” on May 1st. Viewers can also download a free application for their iPod/iPhone in time for the beginning of the season.