A lot of people fail to see the value of Twitter:

“Why should I care what my friend, Dan had for breakfast?”

But this is overlooking the power of a service that is becoming more and more important and valuable. As the Twitter network grows, so does it’s power and reach. With that growth come a number of important benefits:

1. Smart Businesses use Twitter as an instantaneous (if unscientific) feedback mechanism. Let’s say you owned a travel web site and you released a new rating feature. Ask your Twitter followers – it’s an instant focus group.
2. While Google is great for search, the millions of Twitter followers can act like a human-powered answer machine. Let’s suppose you want to know the best bottle of red wine to go with filet mignon. Google is going to struggle with this. Somewhere in your network of Twitter followers, their followers or their followers followers, is a carnivorous wine expert who can ask followup questions and provide the best possible answer.
3. While Google is undoubtable powerful, it’s not live. Someone has to create a page and upload it. Then Google has to index it. All of this takes time. Searching Twitter is instantaneous. This explains why news stories such as the Hudson River Plane Crash on January 15 2009 and heroic pilot Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger, show up on Twitter first. 
4. If you use an ‘Power Twitter’ application like TweetDeck to isolate groups of people you follow that are all interested in the same thing (i.e. Web Design, Cycling, Tube Socks, etc), chances are that if they decide to ‘retweet’ something it’s probably going to interest you. It’s a human filter for the internet.

Look at the rising number of unique visitors to Twitter Search. According to Compete.com, site traffic rose 24% in the month of April 2009 alone. Habits are beginning to shift and ‘live’ or ‘social searching’ is taking off. More and more people are crowdsourcing the answers to their questions and bypassing Google entirely. It will be interesting to see how services like FriendFeed and Aardvark do in the face of this.

 photo credit: Search Engine People Blog