If I’m looking for info into a product then I’ll use a mix of Twitter and Google to get reviews and personal comments about the product.

I don’t see Twitter and Facebook being Google-killers but I do see them pinching some of their market share over time.

One benefit that Google has is that there is no set-up time required. Both Facebook and Twitter require you to add and find friends before you can use it. With Google you just fire up the site and do the search. No registration required. That’s a pretty big benefit that Google has over these other guys.

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One unknown in the equation is whether Twitter can withstand the mainstream onslaught stability-wise, and whether recent rumblings about them agreeing to open up the timeline firehose to Google are true. If they did the latter, I’d rate it a colossal mistake unless they are getting a sweetheart deal.

If I were Twitter, I’d make Google buy me if they really wanted Real-Time Web search.

Now looking at the discussed tie-up between Twitter and Google it is clear to see Google grasps the idea of ease of reach for people searching is more important than destination attention. Many large services have ‘search within the site or search the web’ with the both services being run on Google search.

Another telling note that attention is the wrong focal point is how I increasingly hear, from non-early adopters that they find searching Google for twitter items is far more useful than Twitter search.

There is a difference in the contexts of the two in an ask & retrieve mode. Which to use is at times depends the immediate environmental context (am I on a social tool w/ velocity and trusted experience).

I can also easily see a blended model of ask and retrieve, with social context on the retrieve, just as Yahoo! did with MyWeb2 at one point and inside the firewall tools like Connectbeam do now.

Spoken like a true web designer, that is, someone who doesn’t understand that in this world the game is not attention, but money, or rather a business model, something that neither Twitter nor Facebook have (yes yes Facebook has a revenue stream, but it is not yet profitable, and there is no plan to make it profitable, in other words, it does not have a business model).

People simply do not learn from history. Think of all the hot internet brands over the last 10 years or so that were claimed to have culture-changing impact when they were in the news. A couple come to mind: Napster, Webvan, Kozmo. These brands were hot if not hotter than Facebook and Twitter. But their problem was that there was no business behind the brand. They eventually failed in spectacular fashion, although Napster is still around as a brand, but a mere shadow of its former self.

But what do I know. Facebook and Twitter could develop business models, and succeed in becoming not just popular but profitable. You never know. But what we do know is that, in their current state, they end up like Webvan or Kozmo and will be gone in 10 years, or like Napster, be pale versions of their former selves.

I hope they come up with something big, develop brilliant business models and prove me wrong. But my money’s on history.

Twitter only works for those high-up enough on the Power Law Curve to HAVE a bunch of followers, which is a very tiny (but noisy) section of the population.

However, Facebook doesn’t pose much of a threat to Adwords.

Advertisers do not go to “where there is the most attention” first. They go to where there is the most valuable attention first. Think of People Magazine versus the Yellow Pages. People magazine gets a lot of attention but the Yellow Pages is still a multi-billion dollar business.

I recommend spending a few hundred thousand dollars on Google Adwords and Facebook ads and compare the results. You will get 100x+ times more value for the same spend on the former.

As a business, getting someone’s attention when they are about to buy is much, much, much better than just getting their attention when they are specifically not looking to buy something.

Attention is nearly worthless. Of course, when you have the volume that Facebook has worthless adds up, but I would rather own a search engine with 1% of Facebook’s volume than Facebook (if money is my objective).

Of course, Facebook has done an amazing job over the last few years. I am quite impressed by how well the leadership has executed. But I don’t seem them as much of a threat to Adwords at this point.

Google is putting a lot into their browser, Chrome. If it gets traction, then they’ll have our attention regardless of our “social home page.”

- Andy