Want to know if you’re truly in the technology elite? Let Google tell you!
Try this:
- Go to Google
- Type in your name and the word ‘twitter’ (e.g. hutch carpenter twitter)
- Look at the results
If you see real-time search results at the top of the page, congratulations! You’re a VIP! If not, well, sorry about that.
As was well covered a few months back, Google has made a deal with Twitter to get the real-time firehose of tweets. The actual rollout of tweets in search by Google is still a work in progress.
But I stumbled across this interesting test of Tech Worthiness in doing research for a different blog post. Some searches result in a display of real-time tweets at the top of the page. What’s interesting is who gets this treatment.
The graphic below shows the Google search results for six different people, along with the word “twitter”:
At the top, you can see four people who are elite. They have real-time tweet searches right at the top of the search results:
- Louis Gray – uber chronicler of Silicon Valley and Web 2.0
- Charlene Li – ex-Forrester analyst, co-author of Groundswell, founder of Altimeter Group
- Chris Messina – leader of the OpenID effort
- Jeff Bezos – founder, CEO of Amazon.com
Jeff Bezos is interesting. He does have a twitter account, but they’re all protected tweets.
At the bottom, you see a couple of the non-elite in the tech world. Ashton Kutcher, the first man to the moon…er…to reach 1 million followers on Twitter does not get the real-time tweet treatment from Google.
And alas, I am not part of the tech elite either.
(Cross-posted @ I’m Not Actually a Geek)
Hutch,
I think the difference is in using your name as Twitter id vs. a less meaningful one. Ashton Kutcher shows up if you search for aplusk, and you’re there, too – just search bhc3 instead of your name.
Try using their Twitter usernames, aplusk worked fine
[..] Mylikes makes this more interesting for the minor digerati – those without their tweets showing up inGoogle’s real time search. Using Mylikes to not only make a little cash, but showing off that you can be an influencer in the technology community might not hurt your blogging career. Depending on how many click throughs happen from what you tweet and blog about it might just end up being a better way to bring in operating costs for your blog than AdWords. The better part is that in some respects the idea is better than simple ads, which have caused [..]
Even I am in Tech Elite List