After some shout outs on Twitter, it appeared I wasn’t the only one. The initial Support pages said that the issue would resolve itself over time but after a few weeks I was getting impatient. Hashtags have become an important feature of Twitter and I felt left out during conferences, not being able to participate in the backchannel.

Yesterday @bertboerland sent me a link to file a request to be remove the constraints that have been put, for unknown reasons (I might have been marked as a spam account), on my account. Within a day I received word from Twitter that my tweets appear in search again.

Search is a core feature of Twitter as it is being used to retrieve hashtags related to a particular event for backchannels. Search could become even more powerful if Twitter would extend search retrieval beyond two weeks. It would make extensive analysis possible without scheduling a scraper.

Fig. 1: Part of the main index

Fig. 2: Updates as a subcategory of index results

Fig. 3: The updatesphere

In my real time web results Google is indexing updates performed within the three popular micro-blogging platforms: Twitter, FriendFeed and Identi.ca. Notably absent are the status updates from the social networking site Facebook because of its partial walled garden structure. However, it may not be long before these updates will be included as well because Google recently made a deal with Facebook¹. However, it is interesting to note that Google will only receive Facebook updates from public updates on pages (such as fan pages) while competing search engine Bing will receive updates from public profile pages (personal profiles) that are marked as visible for everyone.

Already in 2008 Google started expanding its indexing focus to actions within social networks but the indexed actions were quite messy, for example:

• silvertje has started 0 topics. silvertje has made 1 reply. … silvertje replied on May 13, 2009 06:25 to the question “We want all …”
• Anteek added a contact: Anne Helmond. MyBlogLog Action submitted by Anteek -
• Uploads from Anne Helmond, tagged… – http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvertje/tags/amsterdam/
• Qik | Anne Helmond | Untitled. Streamed by Anne Helmond. More at http://qik.com/silvertje.

These actions performed on social objects² such as Flickr photos, blog posts and videos, seemed to be Google’s first steps into real-time search. By partnering up with Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca and Twitter, Google has now officially welcomed the updatesphere.

Twitters’ status updates have been included in Google’s index for a while but they are now actively promoted on the main site:

Google Social Search and the statussphere

Please note that this screenshot shows the Social Search experiment, part of Google Labs > Experimental Search. It seems that -while writing- Google removed the real-time social results from the main site and moved it to its Labs.

Status updates are moving from the Web sphere to its own distinct sphere: the updatesphere. Google is acting as a demarcating engine in the construction of the updatesphere.³

1. Google its official partners are: “Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.” Google, Relevance meets the real-time web
2. social because they the objects are part of social web services that allow other people to participate in the objects by tagging, rating, leaving a comment, embedding or favoring for example
3. For more on web spheres: R. Rogers, The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. (38p) [pre-print pdf]

It reminded me of the iTea project made at the RFID Hacker’s Camp 2007:

iTea is an interactive installation in the form of a coffee table.   In the coffee cup on top of the table, you can place your rfid tag – which is given to you at the entrance of the conference and linked to a social network – and the table will start to display information about you. At first it gets your name, description and keywords from the picnic network. Then it will start to Google your firstname and lastname. Then it just googles your first name but substitutes it by your full name. The result is visualized by a projection from within the table to the surface of the table, in the form of drops of information. (Erik Borra project description)

The iTea project makes users aware of both “the gossip” online and the voyeuristic tendencies of datamining search engine indexes. Ego Googling is not so much a self-centric tendency that points to the glorification of the self online as it points to an awareness of the presentation of the self online by search engines. The self online is not shaped by yourself but by search engines. So who am I anno 2009 according to Google?

Anne Helmond is

• Anne Helmond is a New Media Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam at the Media Studies department.
• So the brief day that was Blog08 is over and our blogging reporter, Anne Helmond, is back home. She rounds up over on her own blog.
• Anne Helmond is member #1 of journalism research.
• Anne Helmond is a member of Mobile Monday Amsterdam.
• Anne Helmond is a member of Wolvenstraat, Amsterdam OpenCoffee Meetup.
• Anne Helmond is a new media researcher, graphic designer and photographer.
• Anne Helmond is docent New Media en onderzoeker bij de afdeling Mediastudies van de Universiteit van Amsterdam.
• Lovink stresses that the Main object of research Anne Helmond is working on is that bloggers start to realize they are ‘working for google’ and contributing …
• Het profiel van Anne Helmond is gewijzigd 25 Jan.
• Anne Helmond is een absolute helemaal geekster.
• Volgens Software Studies onderzoeker Anne Helmond is een door software gecreëerde wereld opaak, het vormt ons media gedrag maar verbergt een achterliggende …
• Anne Helmond (Anne Helmond is silvertje on Twitter).
• De reactie van Anne Helmond is:. March 25, 2008 @ 7:41 pm.
• Anne Helmond is lid #340 van Twitterborrel.

Anne Helmond was:

• Anne Helmond was inspired by both projects and asks MTV to be MADE into a killer PHP programmer.
• Anne Helmond was one of the fifty blogger from around Europe who participated in the European Bloggers Unconference
• Anne Helmond was er wel, en deze prachtige foto komt uit haar flickr-stream.
• Ken het verhaal (nog) niet achter dit zelfportret van Anne Helmond. Was ze melig, of juist heel overtuigd?
• Anne Helmond was tot nu toe betrokken bij het weblog Masters of Media, een weblog gerelateerd aan de Mastersstudie Nieuwe Media.
• Anne Helmond was haar naam.
• Anne Helmond was your fan before and now you two are friends.

Anne Helmond will be:

• Anne Helmond will be blogging back from Blog08 for us, with a focus on the online journalism aspects.
• This Thursday Anne Helmond will be giving a lecture on ‘The Widgetized Self‘ a term coined by Nancy Baym.

What surprises me is the amount of social actions indexed such as “Anne Helmond is (now) a member of…” it confirms the increasing trend of indexed social actions and memberships as I previously described in: Google expands its indexing focus to actions within social networks.

What: Second Open-Search Workshop
When: Saturday April 28, 2007, 13.00h CET, 11.00h GMT, 06.00h EST, 4.00h EET, 01.00h HST, 04.00h MSTDuration: official program will be 4 hours
Where (physical): CREA, room 204, Turfdraagsterpad 17, 1012 XT Amsterdam (route: http://www.crea.uva.nl/contact/zoomplattegrond.html)
Where (virtual): http://www.open-search.net/Opensearch/SecondWorkshop
Cost: free attendance, free drinks
More info: http://www.open-search.net/Opensearch/SecondWorkshop

If you can hold a keyboard, you should be at this workshop!

The open-search project proposes to build a distributed, peer-to-peer, search-engine. By combining the already existing technologies ofpeer-to-peer file storage, distributed crawling and peer-to-peer searching, we hope to solve the problems inherent to a centralized search-engine: manipulation, censorship and profiling.

After a period of contemplation and reflection, the open-search project is ready for some serious hacking and discussion. If you have any programming skills, analytic skills, interface design skills or other skills that you can use to contribute to the open search project, we have todo list items with your name on them! Those concerned with the legal and policy details of the project are also welcome for the non-technical track, to discuss policies, legal issues, issues of deployment and ideology versus users.

Virtual attendance will be possible through on-site A/V streaming and internet relay chat (IRC, a web interface will be provided for thoseunfamiliar with IRC clients). The details will be posted on http://www.open-search.net/Opensearch/SecondWorkshop shortly. If you can not be present physically, you don’t have to miss this workshop. The chat will be projected on a large screen during the workshop.

The preliminary program for this workshop is:

1. an overview of our current progress and the current state of the client (by Robin, our main developer)
2. hands-on: there will be an install party to get the thing running on everybodies computer (bring your laptop)
3. hands-on: after installation the workshop will continue in two tracks:

• technical: discuss, plan and code
• theoretical: discussion about and planning of activities related to p2p research, law (with guidance of Joris van Hoboken, http://www.ivir.nl/staff/vanhoboken.html), motivation (elaboration on http://www.open-search.net/Opensearch/WhyOpenSearch), community activation

I’m definitely going to try to attend because last meeting was quite interesting and I hope I might be able to contribute interfacewise.

These big media conglomerates are dominating the search engine landscape and there seems to be an endless media concentration going on. What is the impact on the access to information when only a few players dominate the market?

These and other questions will be posed by open-search.net which is supported by the Digital Pioneers in a workshop about creating a distributed, peer to peer search engine.

Join the discussion on Tuesday, December 12 at 19.00 hours @ the University of Amsterdam, Turfdraagsterspad 9, Amsterdam.

If you can’t make it physically you can always join on IRC or listen/view an audio/video stream

More info: https://twiki.sonologic.nl/twiki/bin/view/Opensearch/KickOffWorkshop