Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

What Will Be the Big Tweet from Twitter Event Today? A New Search Offering Would Be Nice….

Yesterday–presumably so as not to be left out of the dueling press gatherings that Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG) and Facebook have all had in recent weeks to show off fancy new stuff–Twitter lobbed out an an invite for an event this afternoon:

We’d like to invite you to come to Twitter HQ for an event tomorrow afternoon (Sept 14)…Please be there by 3:45pm. RSVP below.

See you there.

So, what, oh, what are those little elves at the microblogging service going to show off?

It could be a lot of things, from a new advertising shiny object to the results of recent promoted tweet efforts to updated mobile products.

Or perhaps it is introducing some more video capability into its tweets.

And maybe Twitter bought some pretty little start-up or is annoying a whole new fascist country.

So, because BoomTown always reads to the last page of mysteries to get to the ending first, here is my best spoiler guess of what Twitter could announce: An updated search offering.

Well, at least, I hope the company will finally fill in what has become what I consider to be one of the very biggest holes in its service.

Right now, Twitter’s real-time search engine uses technology from Summize, which it bought in 2008.

And, simply put, it remains pretty lousy–with an index that only holds tweets from a few days and has no massive archive.

In fact, results have been better from others, such as Google and the Microsoft (MSFT) Bing search service, both of which did deals to license Twitter’s flood of tweets about a year ago.

And Google recently upped the ante with its dedicated real-time search offering, made up, in large part, of Twitter’s index archive and including a coolio timeline.

It is long past time for Twitter to keep up here, in terms of simple innovation, given these tweets are its own content.

What would be interesting to see is if Twitter needed the help of a search giant such as Google or Microsoft to help power such a service–sources said its execs had been putting feelers out many months ago on the subject of such aid.

Then again, it could all be home built, too.

In any case, let’s hope Twitter gives its tweets the respect they deserve.

Or else introduces its own mobile device called the Tweetphone that vibrates every time you are mentioned on Twitter.

Until then, here is the video of the very funny “Tweet Tweet” rap song from Jimmy Kimmel and Drake that debuted in late June:

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