Blunt – The Conversation Agency

According to a Google Fellow who led the development of their real-time search project, Google ranks tweets using a technology that is analogous to PageRank. So, your number of followers and your number of followers’ followers determines whether your tweets are deemed relevant in the eyes of Google.

“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Amit Singhal says. “As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”

I can’t even begin to articulate the stupidity of this move. Google’s reasoning was brilliant when applied to the web, an entity that is largely composed of static documents. But real-time has a totally different essence–one that is much more about fluidity and stunning immediacy, an immediacy that cares nothing for personal popularity and network size.

To understand that, Google just needs to cast an eye at the horrible tragedy unfolding in Haiti. Much like what happened in Iran last summer, when tweets emerged from devastated Port-au-Prince, they came from regular people, citizen journalists with mobile devices who had extremely small followings and were total unknowns beforehand. But they were proximate to the event, and that’s what mattered.

Yet theirs are precisely the voices that are stymied by PageRank. Applying the logic of PageRank to real-time search just doesn’t make any sense. When it comes to terrible events like the earthquake in Haiti, the musings of a Pete Cashmore or a Larry King shouldn’t be priviledged over the thoughts, emotions, and dispatches of the real people experiencing the trauma on the ground.

But it looks like Google would prefer to have the beautiful immediacy of real-time mediated by a self-indulgent cabal of twitter elites, rather than freely flowing through empowered nobodies like you and I.