Google is getting more and more friendly with Twitter, and the Twitterverse is awash with rumors of a Google Twitter buy-out. This is very strongly denied by Twitter-bosses but it is fair to say that Google is trying to become more social. Now, Google is running a new experiment where for a select number of users, a twitter integration box will be revealed.
Google often runs small experiments where they ask small groups of people to trial test features to gather more feedback and in this case users are being asked to connect their Twitter accounts. After a user does this, Google trawls their Twitter friends for any links and display any related news in a column in Google News. Twitter has said that Google could do this as Google has unfettered access to Twitters deluge of data. This output should inject a bit of dynamism into the relatively static Google news output and make the results more relevant and personal.
Google’s Live search, which indexes and displays tweets in real-time, has been somewhat popular if sometimes a bit overwhelming. It’s going to be interesting to see if this feature ever sees the light of day but it does affirm one of Google’s new directions and is probably the vanguard for even more social web integration. Let’s hope that if the feature does get released it performs better than Google Buzz which has yet to find a user base that represents critical mass.
