Searching Twitter
We've just added Profile Search to Twitter! Now you can search across profile information like name, location, bio, and url. That means you can find more people to follow. The search box is over on the right when you're signed in.
Context & Ripple Effects
The feature lands weeks after commentary faulted [[a:|]] Twitter's unusually slow development cycle, noting that upgrades were landing at Jaiku, Facebook, and Pownce instead — so shipping anything new is itself the story. It also follows the company's spring 2007 venture raise and a stretch that included a security hole exposing private posts and phone-in tweeting via Dave Winer's TwitterGram.
Discovery is the practical problem being solved here: with no syndicated pickup or public discussion recorded, this is a quiet product fix aimed at helping a funded-but-small network convert visitors into followers by making name, location, bio, and URL fields searchable.
First-order effects
- Signed-in users gain a way to find accounts worth following beyond their existing contacts, attacking the empty-timeline problem that stalls early-stage social networks.
Second-order effects
- Rivals criticized as moving faster than Twitter — Pownce, Jaiku, and Facebook per the July 2007 commentary — face pressure to match on-profile discovery rather than just out-shipping on features.
Third-order effects
- If profile search matures into full content search, profile metadata stops being a static bio and becomes the index a network's growth engine runs on — a shift from importing your address book toward searching the network itself.
The trend: Social platforms in 2007 are turning internal search from a utility into their primary account-discovery and growth mechanism, with Twitter's profile index an early instance.