If you don’t know what twitter is by now, you should. And here’s my profile: @hdragomir.

What surprisingly many twitter-ers  don’t know about is search.twitter.com. Imagine being able to know what the internet-broken world is thinking, saying, sharing, on any topic, in real time. It’s not just about the links, and their indexing — it’s about everything. Think about the twitter revolution, or the #SaveJon campaign.

Google needs some time to crawl pages, index them, calculate their rank and even after that, older results may still be ranked higher — so you’re not to trust google.com for insight into what’s hot now.
twitter search is like a realtime google.
What’s also notable is that twitter search isn’t competing, shouldn’t and most probably won’t compete with google for searching. For searching the web, google is king and will be for a very long time. Twitter is doing something else.

My wet dream about this has to do with localization. Imagine searching twitter for a phrase and having the option for it to return only results from your area. Imagine how fast information would travel then, and the ease with which you can find it. It’s totally possible, even right now.

When you tweet, twitter can access your  browser’s geolocation API and see where you are. Some browsers support this out of the box, like Firefox and Opera, many new cell phones come equipped with GPS and, for the rest of the people, twitter could use an IP to location service — plenty of them available. If this happens, twitter will know where you are when you tweet and when you search. I’m pretty sure twitter can put two and two together for the rest.

Of course, this idea will never fly because some people are too concerned with their privacy. But maybe twitter could add an opt-out for this feature.

Like I said, it’s just a wet dream.