What Marissa Mayer said about Google and Twitter
There have been a couple of posts today speculating about what Eric Schmidt and his team said about Twitter at a company press event in Mountain View, Calif., on Thursday. I have the verbatim text, which I thought might be helpful to post below for the record.
The precise question to Schmidt was about the evolution of Google's thinking on what some people call micro-messaging.
"Is this code for Twitter?" Schmidt asked. "The term I've been using is micro-blogging."
Yes, it was code for Twitter. From there, Schmidt bounced the question to search products chief Marissa Mayer, who explained that Google was interested in the possibilities for micro-messaging/micro-blogging, particularly from the search perspective. She said:
Not a lot surprising here. As you might expect for a search company, Google wants to find some way to mine and analyze the exploding volume of information being churned out by the micro-messaging world (read: Twitter). As Mayer suggests, figuring out what's trending in real-time could have implications for how Google orders other kinds of search results, whether it's in news, blog or Web search.
Nothing was said about Google creating a competitor to Twitter, nor was it implied.
Which is not to say Google's isn't planning such a thing. The company would be negligent if it wasn't at least talking about how to beat Twitter. But its executives definitely aren't talking about it to us.
-- David Sarno