Houdini

Plenty are just "passing time" on Google as well. I agree that there's a difference in someone searching in Google and someone searching Twitter, but take a look at search.twitter.com. Twitter's the only real time "search" out there. No, it's not web pages, but it's what people are talking about IN REAL TIME. That's pretty amazing if you think about it. What other site can archive conversation or blurbs in real time among millions and millions of people all over the world. Search engines can't come close. When news hits, regardless of the size. i.e., Michael Jackson Dead or Car Accident 101 Freeway, search twitter and see how many results you get. Then type that in Google, excluding the news section and see what you find. Usually Zilch, because they can't crawl that fast. Especially for local news or events, it can beat almost any content site out there.

And ads on Twitter, could actually be a higher converter than google!? How? Say you type insurance in google and you land on a sales web site desperately trying to get you to click on an affiliate link with little information on the user experience about the company. Or say you type in insurance in Twitter and you have a real person, talking about a good experience at Gieco. There just happens to be a Geico ad right below the post, where the reader wants to see more. It's like a real time review. That's just one possibility on how you could target ads. Companies are making money off it too, Dell has reported they've made $3 million from it. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/...y-off-twitter/. Don't you sell anything? You can't use the extra traffic?

I wouldn't expect Murdoch to have anything positive to say about sites that compete with myspace. He trashed Facebook too back in the day and watched his users switch and his traffic plummet.

In any case, I'm going to bump this thread in a year and it'll be interesting to see what happened.