Google accounts on Twitter
Like lots of you, we've been drawn into Twitter this year. After all, we're all about frequent updates ourselves, and there's lots happening around here that we want to share with you. Of course, we enjoy watching, and contributing to, the tweetstream (we hope you find our tweets useful, too).
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the latest step in a slow courtship between Google and Twitter. In December 2008 Google welcomed Twitter into Friend Connect, and by February 2009 it was piping a stream of Google tweets onto its own properties; opening official Google-branded accounts makes the relationship direct rather than mediated through widgets.
The pickup was modest — TechCrunch framed the move around the question of how much Google actually likes Twitter — but the signal is that Google now treats an outside microblogging service as a legitimate corporate communications channel alongside its own blog.
First-order effects
- Google gains a real-time channel for the 'frequent updates' its blog says it wants to share, while Twitter gains one of the web's highest-profile corporate accounts as validation and traffic.
Second-order effects
- Other large companies face a template for official microblogging presences, raising expectations that brands meet users in the tweetstream rather than only on their own domains — pressure that lands on Google's own social tooling like Friend Connect too.
Third-order effects
- If incumbent platforms keep adopting rivals' social infrastructure for distribution, the pattern points toward social networks becoming shared communications rails — with deeper search-and-data integration between Google and Twitter as the logical next question, not just coexistence.
The trend: Large internet companies are shifting from building standalone social features to adopting third-party platforms like Twitter as official communications and distribution channels.