Comparing Twitter and Blogosphere Latency

With all the bzzz around Twitter, and its apparent ability to walk on water right up to the brass ring of search, I’m still looking for the definitive study comparing discovery times in Twitter with those in other forms of social media. The study is pretty easy to perform:

1. Grab some Twitter data and extract some URLs
2. Use Twitter search to find the first mention of those URLs
3. Use a blog search engine to find the first mention in the blogosphere
4. Vice versa

This news article Defiant N Korea launches rocket first appeared on Twitter here 5 hours ago, but the earliest I can find it in the blogosphere is here 4 hours ago.

Endangered right whales appear to be on the rebound appeared a full day in the blogosphere before Twitter.

Neither the blogosphere nor Twitter cares about Ice bridge ruptures in Antarctic, and it seems neck-a-neck for Russia to unveil spaceship plans.

Of course, one would have to do a bit more work to really see what is going on. Twitter search doesn’t dereference URLs, so you can’t really search for the first mention of something, never mind the whole can of worms called URLs (the BBC usually has 2 URLs per story…).

And which stories do you want to check for anyway? Those that snowball into big piles of links may be less important (some signal will reach the user anyway).

Twitter search’s trends currently include ‘North Korea’, but then again, Google’s blogsearch has a top cluster for the same topic (and using the title of a post ‘North Korea launches rocket’ is more informative). Twitter also includes ‘DSI’, but Google has ‘Console Review: Nintendo DSi’.

Comments

[Daniel Tunkelang]

These may be interesting questions from a research perspective, but I think the more practical question is not where the stories are first published, but rather where people first learn about them. Almost every story I've heard on Twitter had initially appeared somewhere else on the web. But often I wouldn't have heard the news as quickly if it weren't for Twitter. In those cases, from my perspective as a consumer, Twitter reduces latency.

[Jason Adams]

Have you checked out backtweets.com? It dereferences short urls posted on twitter so you can do the kind of searching you mentioned there. There were quite a few links to this post (several pages worth) posted on twitter according to a search on there:

http://backtweets.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdatamining.typepad.com%2Fdata_mining%2F2009%2F04%2Fcomparing-twitter-and-blogosphere-latency.html

while searching for this url on twitter search only yields two.

Looks like an API is available too.

[Khurram]

Twitter is like a breath of fresh air on the Social Media scene. I have been on it for just a few weeks now and I have met several interesting people. It is a platform to network with people you would like to meet in real life. Check me out!!

http://twitter.com/spryka

[cheap seo work]

you have to just love twitter. it is taking over the world.

[Geospatial services]

Interesting comparison.Got a chance to study the interesting features of twitter and blogosphere.Thanks for sharing.
regards
http://www.sblgis.com/gis-services.aspx

[Kevin Burton]

Hey Matthew.

I think the issue with Twitter is not as much timeliness as both graph structure, sentiment, and depth.

For example. Twitter might have surfaced the URL sooner but the blog post on it might be more valuable for search since it will have more text, more links, and potentially more history for the search.

Also, a lot of search engines aren't as real time as they could be... With Spinn3r, we've tightened up latency and when we get a ping it's out and into our customers within a minute or so...

Of course there will always be a *bit* of latency....

Also..... to index Twitter your engine is going to have to not bias links too much as FRESH news isn't going to have inbound links to go by since it hasn't had a chance to build them yet.

Kevin