Twitter and Google have once again reached an agreement. The 140-character microblogging service sets to provide the search engine giant the access to its full stream of tweets.
Commonly called the Twitter "firehose," the news was formally announced on February 5th, 2015, Twitter Twitter earnings call by CEO Dick Costolo.
At the time of the announcement, Costolo was sparce. He didn't mentioned much of the details in his formal presentation, but he confirmed there was a deal.
"We've got the opportunity now to drive a lot of attention to and aggregate eyeballs, if you will, to these logged-out experiences, topics and events that we plan on delivering on the front page of Twitter. And that's one of the reasons this makes a lot more sense for us now," he said.
Costolo was referring to experiments and changes that the company has been doing to better convert people who come across its content but aren't yet logged in to Twitter.
The partnership follows Twitter's improved SEO efforts it made the year before. With better traffic, Twitter wants to give Google even more content in hopes of bigger returns.
For Twitter
Search engines is nevertheless the one and very powerful place to get incoming visitors. And when it comes to search engines, there is no one better (more powerful) than Google.
Twitter is massive. But because not everyone is on Twitter, Twitter has lost some grip when trying to get revenue from people that aren't its users. In 2014, 46 percent of Twitter's users visited the site daily, in 2014, the number dropped to 36 percent.
Out of the top 5 social media networks, Twitter is the lowest.
The partnership benefits Twitter mainly by tapping into Google's massive exposure. With tweets regarded as contents for Google, the partnership means there will be more tweets to be shown on Google. And that's potential in creating a huge gain of traffic on a global scale.
For Google
Google is all about content. With the partnership, Google has the access to the "endless" stream of tweets, also known as the "firehose". With about 6000 to over 10,000 tweets a second, there is a lot of contents for Google's interest.
Before, people are looking for information that are just minutes ago, not hours ago. This is where Twitter shines. But as time passes, people are now looking for information that are seconds ago, not minutes ago.
Google used to crawl Twitter in order to get tweets for its search results. That method didn't work well because its crawlers aren't capable enough to crawl through 10,000 tweets yet effectively, because if the crawlers do want/can get through all of those tweets, Twitter may very well crashes.
With the partnership, Twitter is the one who's feeding Google with its tweet contents, not Google forcing itself in crawling and indexing Twitter's tweets to feed.