So what’s the deal with this new Google buzz thing.

Google’s core premise is the googlerank, that uncanny linking metric that derives all its notions of web page authority from what other pages and links of authority link to such pages. But, these days, with 90% at best of pages and links on the world wild web being churned out by spammers and search engine scammers, google needs more sources of organic and authentic web sharing behaviour. It’s getting harder and harder to hear the signal through the noise.

By not owning a twitter, Google is missing out on having visibility or being able to track and index a huge part of modern web. That huge part is the so-called “real-time web”, formerly knows as social presence. Basically all those status updates and link sharing that twitter has become the killer app for.

Google must be craving their own twitter just to be able to see and track all the links that real actual humans are sharing with each other and what real humans are talking about and finding interesting. They need this badly for their search results and their ad targeting. And even better to have such a source whose data they don’t have to share with Microsoft.

Thats google’s eminent reason anyway. What’s the rest-of-our’s reason for using buzz over twitter or fb? Who knows yet.

Aside: perhaps first thing twitter could do to defend against buzz? Publish a twitter interface that resolves and thumbnails web links, pics and videos inline with the twitter stream. Or maybe that would be sacrilege.

Scoble has a great rant up today on twitter’s failing as a platform. This is similar to Jevon’s epic (and correct) rant on why you shouldn’t build a business on Facebook… or otherwise on someone else’s platform. At least not unless you are prepared to take the risks.

Risks being: did you know that twitter’s search history only goes back a few weeks? Did you think that all those pithy tweets and all those nice things folks may have said about you in @replies would be around forever as an archive or historical record? Don’t count on it.

Maybe, if we’re lucky, Twitter [see illustration] will be around forever, maybe if we’re lucky they’ll keep alive the archives of bit.ly and twitpic etc. so in the future we’d have some idea of what those links were pointing to. Maybe part of that business model will be the charging for access to the tweet archive. But there’s no guarantee.

To twitter’s fault/credit these problems relate to twitter being a little too good at what they do. It only becomes a problem once everyone (well at least all the cool people) pervasively filter a big part of our daily lives, our ideas, world events, our businesses through this single channel.

Does it make a lot of sense to route the western world’s realtime social backchannel through a single point of failure?

Historically, what is the life expectancy of any hottest new social platform? friendster, icq, geocities, hotmail^* all had a good run while they lasted?

reminds one of an old haiku, the zen of 404 messages:

You step in the stream,
But the water has moved on.
This page is not here.

my advice? go out and invent the world’s next open-standards, distributed realtime social presence application. Or if you don’t have time for that, at least think about archiving your tweets. You never know when you might want them back.

more: Twitter’s platform shortcomings

more: tools for backing up your tweets. I haven’t tried them yet (I should probably get on that). tips?

^{*cough myspace, *cough* yahoo inc., AOL, compuserve, gopher the list could go on /for another deadmedia post}

As Mark says, is the facebook honeymoon ending? A certain schadenfreude [twopointoh-denfreude?] in me would like to claim it so (damn that Zuckerberg, so rich and so young).

Certainly, the “open” application platform (open crapplication platform?) has nearly been facebook’s downfall. A grand experiment in which Mr Z has learned that if you do freely open up your wildly successful internet platform to thousands of pointless, self-interested, attention seeking crapplets, that – like some epic biblical plague of digitally-winged attention locusts – tens of thousands of self-interested, attention sucking crapplets will rapaciously attempt to take advantage of your success. Who knew?

My facebook page looks as though seized by a grand mal craptileptic fit in spam factory.

Meanwhile, it gets worse, you just can’t hide on facebook anymore. Every ‘slackjawed acquaintance’ you’ve ever known is poking you now, biting you like a zombie or worse. Some of these people don’t even have any proper geek cred at all (the horror). I joke, but there is known problem of managing facebook if you are a highly popular person.

So anyway, the real nerds are going back to Twitter. [I don't know where the actual popular people are going]

Twitter is safe. For one it does a lot less, so it’s as yet uncorrupted. And, lets face it, it’s really only the nerds who are on Twitter so far. Twitter is mostly interesting for who’s not on it (and it’s handy that you can discretely un-follow people if need be) and for the special culture and secret @ # language that has grown up around it.

I like twitter a lot, but know that facebook is working hard to put the wrong bits of toothpaste back in the tube, and will be doing a lot to, no doubt, be twice as big in 2008. And if the alpha geeks are turning away from facebook, maybe this means they’ve actually exactly hit it right, and made something everyone else can use.

When twitter too, jumps the shark chasm this year to general popularity, I’m sure the flighty geek-set be on to something else by then anyway. Mixin anyone?

You can add me on twitter here.

You can add me on facebook here.