Techmeme, Twitter and Real Time Search

Techmeme is now trawling Twitter as well as blogs and the online news world to get an indication of what is being talked about - Wired:

On Thursday, Techmeme chief Gabe Rivera announced that the site would now be aggregating tweets — the 140-character micro-posts found on Twitter.

The move represents another milestone in Twitter’s seemingly inexorable march toward becoming a central news water cooler of the internet era.

“I think this is yet another step in Twitter becoming a mainstream news service, since more people will recognize it as such now,” Rivera said in an email to Wired.com. “Content-wise, tweets will never play the leading role, but they’ll play a supporting role, and will act as glue and early warning.”

Why do it, and why now - after all, Twitter has been around awhile? I think the answer is here:

Rivera said he’s not sure if the move will boost traffic, but he said the goal of the shift is to improve the site, “which should expand our readership.”

Au contraire, I suspect the issue Techmeme has been having is that people are linking direct from their Twitter aggregators to stories, rather than going to Techmeme first, a trend which could eventually make one's Twitter aggregator the "Go To" news site (and which is what Tweetmeme et al are trying to do.) If you have the real time search and aggregation already, adding Twitter is not hard to do*

So are blogs therefore dead, as Business Insider argues - on Twitter?

“Now it’s official. Blogs are dead.”

No, we would argue, and that twt shows why - its a statement, without any reasoning or backup. I for one am not going to use a service that just points me to one liners like that. There has to be some beef somewhere, and blogs are the best way of delivering that.

*A bit of an aside - we actually built a blog/news search system a few years ago (see here), and looked at turning it into a Twitter search (it's not that hard) but were darned if we could see a sustainable business model for just reading twts.