Things and Stuff

vs. 

When perusing my friend and classmate Daniel Kong’s blog The Black Renaissance, I stumbled upon this post from last week regarding the supplanting of Google by Twitter.  In his post, Daniel discusses how via Twitter, consumers and marketers are now able to perceive trends and find changes in public perception before they have even become noticeable enough to be picked up by major search engines – namely, Google.

This leads to an interesting thought process regarding the nature of each website.  When originally released, Twitter was thought of as a social media network, meant for businesses to keep target consumers updated, while Google has always been primarily a search engine, albeit the most well-regarded and powerful in the world.  However, as each firm seeks to develop their product and domain further, the inevitable is happening: turf wars.  Google has Gmail, Google Docs, and Google chat, each of which, while not directly competing with Twitter, competes with Twitter for consumers’ time when they are online.  Twitter. on the other hand, is being used at an increasing rate by trend watching websites and consumer behaviour analysts as influential individuals are likely to post their thoughts on, say, a fashion show via their Twitter immediately after it happens. Thus, consumer ideas and burgeoning trends are available for comment before they can even become substantial enough to register in a search engine.

However, I am still of the belief that Twitter could never compete with Google where it matters.  While it may be fabulous for monitoring trends, the only way that these trends hit the population as a whole in this modern day and age is via a solid page or domain that can generate the hits necessary to create a stir among consumers – thus, Twitter may catch on to the ideas first, but the ideas become trends via hits on Google.  This applies not only to the fashion industry, but also to general trends regarding consumer preferences, reactions to new products, and changing social movements. All in all, I feel that the two regard each other with a competitive mindset, but can in fact benefit each other. The competition only starts once Facebook is factored in…