Google began feeding news headlines to Twitter this week, but fewer Twitters seem to care about that than say, Oprah or Martha Stewart.
In the past few days Google News on Twitter has amassed only 2,900 followers, compared to just shy of 700k for Oprah, half of which accumulated over a weekend. It’s hard to say what to make of that; Oprah enjoys a massive and loyal television audience while Google generally only whispers things into cyberspace.
But it does bring up the question as to the type of account that succeeds on Twitter. So far, celebrity personalities any particular information service or branded vehicle. On top of that, with a 60 percent abandonment rate, one can safely cut a follower number in half. Twitters are interested in news, however, as CNNbrk now has 1.2 million followers.
The Google News blog boasts of aggregating 25,000 news sources for its services, but only a handful carefully selected sources seem to make it into its Twitter stream. Just a quick look at the first three pages of tweets shows so long as the news source is Reuters, CNN, Fox, BBC, New York Times, or LA Times, it’s trusted by whomever is running Google News’ Twitter account. But that could be a time-sensitive anomaly.
What’s also interesting is the URL shortener Google has chosen for its Twitter feed: bit.ly. One supposes that’s an endorsement over tinyurl or any of the other competing shorteners out there.
Google News’s new Twitter channel also brings up the question of how the AP and other news organizations recently so critical of Google will react. This almost seems like a good faith effort to extend more traffic to those outfits.
