Robert Scoble is wrong about Real Time Search

I was fortunate enough to meet the Scobleizer at Jeff Pulver’s Social Media Jungle at CES this January. I watched him speak, asked him a couple questions afterward and gave him a high five. He is a cool guy, and I respect his accomplishments. With that being said… I totally disagree with his final thoughts in this post entitled:

Real-time systems hurting long-term knowledge?

I just don’t see a tremendous opportunity in cataloging each real time tidbit for future searching. Where is the value, Robert?

Works as designed

When I was an Acquisitions Officer doing software development in the Air Force and we would find a defect that we wanted to make the developer eat, I used to hate it when they would come back with a WAD response, or works as designed. One thing Robert and I can agree on is that real time search is horrible if I want to see what people were talking about yesterday or two months ago… Especially if they were talking about it a lot, as the older messages just get pushed down into oblivion.

But real time search is not horrible if I’m searching in real time. If I want to find somebody to talk about a certain topic with, at a certain moment, then real time search allows me to do that, easily.

It works as it has been designed.

Why should real time search do what search does?

I’ve been working on this for the better part of a year with some colleagues. The question we’re asking is: is there any value in saving everything that is discussed? I think that there can be value derived from saving everything that is discussed about certain things that you care about. The problem is that you don’t always know what you care about until you start to get results back, which may be too late… or you think you care about something and then get results back and find out that you don’t.

The conclusion I’m coming to is, why bother looking at search and real time search the same way? What I find interesting about real time search is that it is different from traditional search engine searching.

There are two variables while searching in real time, whereas there is only one variable when I’m searching on a search engine. On Google, I’m only really searching for information associated with the keyword(s) I’m using. That’s one variable. However with real time search, there isn’t much information involved. I’m looking for the message attached to the keyword I’m searching for… but I’m also looking for the individual attached to the message attached to the keyword I’m using.

Real time search helps you find people talking about a topic and not just the topic itself. And it is important to note that it finds people talking in the present tense.

Opportunity Knocking?

So is Archived Real Time Search a huge opportunity for someone like Facebook or Google, like Robert Scoble declares? I say no. First off, 140 characters isn’t big enough to really get anything of value from if I search two years from now. If I want to look up the U.S. Air photo taken on the Hudson (Robert’s example) I can just Google it, I don’t need to find it on Twitter.

Second people talk about things in real time as they are relevant in real time, not things that may be universally relevant. Erick Schonfeld points out the difference between consciousness and memory in this really good TechCrunch post: The Real Time Search Dilemma: Consciousness Versus Memory

A collective consciousness doesn’t necessarily need to be archived and searchable, because the value lies in the trends, and not the information. Instead of worrying about the opportunity associated with searching archived snippets, we should be thinking of the opportunity associated with enhancing trend analysis with ALL the metadata associated with these snippets.

The Next Big Thing

Its interesting to know that people are talking about Michael Jackson on Twitter, as it happens. But how much more interesting is it to know that the majority of these people are young, middle aged, or old and live on the West Coast, in Middle America, or on the East Coast?

And that’s just scratching the surface.

The next big thing with Real Time search is for marketers, Robert. If I can use Google to explore flu trends around the world, think of of what Nike or Addidas or Reebok can do with Twitter after a press release goes out with news of the latest athlete they just signed to a fat endorsement deal.

Scratch that, think of what Nike or Addidas or Reebok can do with Twitter today to find the next athlete to endorse, just by matching who and where is talking- to their target sales demographics associated with a new sneaker.

I think that real time trend searching is the future of real time search, which means that I have disagreed with Robert Scoble. What do you think?