Jackie Danicki

Allow me to gloat for one second here. Please.

Back in May 2008, I wrote:

I’m loving Twitter search engine Summize, which beats former Twitter search contenders Tweetscan and Terraminds by a country mile. (God only knows what PPC on there could yield the Summize gang - it should be loads).

Shortly after I blogged that, Twitter acquired Summize. Fast forward many months to today, when Michael Arrington writes at TechCrunch that It’s Time To Start Thinking Of Twitter As A Search Engine:

[Twitter is] going to build their business model on [search]. Forget small time payments from users for pro accounts and other features, all they have to do is keep growing the base and gather more and more of those emotional grunts. In aggregate it’s extremely valuable. And as Google has shown, search is vastly monetizable - somewhere around 40% of all online advertising revenue goes to ads on search listings today.

And as John Battelle says, its not clear that Google or anyone else can compete with Twitter at this point (Facebook’s giving it a solid try, though).

Of course, PPC isn’t the only search model that can make Twitter money, but it seemed pretty glaringly obvious last May as the easiest and most measurable. I hope the Summize dudes got a lot of money for their service when Twitter bought them.

Filed under: Life