Just wrote a post on Twitter’s custom timelines and got inspired on a different angle, so here’s another post!

What will custom timelines do for search on Twitter? Will Twitter prove to be a competitor to Google, when it comes to search?

Personally, I get most of my news update from Twitter and the idea of being able to read through a timeline of Tweets and get an idea of the big picture sounds awesome.Especially since some of these Tweets would likely have links to relevant articles. This would be preferred to Google searching it all, because results on Google are based on algorithms, whereas the custom timeline would be a handpicked, socially curated list of events (through tweets). I like the idea of reading articles that were found to be the most informative/useful based on social opinion, rather than algorithms.

Should Google be scared? And will Twitter potentially nail search? I mean sure, they had hashtags before, but its incredibly different to get the whole story through a hashtag search (it’s super messy, no chronology and no way to know which are the most relevant tweets). Custom timelines on the other hand may be able to give Google a run for its money in a way that it might not have intended!