You better be ready for a big announcement today by Twitter. This follows a tweet by Pankaj Gupta, who is an Engineering Manager at Twitter. The exact text of his tweet was:
Search & discovery in @twitter set to change forever after tmrw. Team – congrats and enjoy the enormity of ur impact few understand today!
The screenshot is shown below.
His LinkedIn profile
According to Pankaj’s LinkedIn profile his headline is Lead of personalization and recommender systems at Twitter, Inc. His specialties are Recommendation and Discovery Engines, Algorithms, Software, Information retrieval, Graphs, Computer networking. Pankaj has been at Twitter for over 3 years so he would certainly be in the know!
Pankaj’s expertise and skills are listed as Management ,Information Retrieval, Algorithms, Graphs, Computer Science, Recommender Systems and Personalization. His background shows solid research credentials, some entrepreneurial flair (has has started 2 companies) and he has a PhD in Computer Science. This is one guy who knows his stuff.
What could this be about?
What could this be all about regarding search and discovery? We already know that Twitter is becoming much stricter with usage of its APIs. An article was written on that recently about how LinkedIn updates can no longer be done by Twitter. Twitter is steadily improving features on the site but lately it seems to be accelerating somewhat in this regard which can only be a good thing for its business model.
Search and discovery the way to go
Improving search and discovery on Twitter can only be a good thing. As we are overwhelmed by the amount of information in general and Tweets as well, a more effective and efficient process of finding relevant content would be greatly appreciated.
Predicting and suggesting interesting content
Perhaps Twitter seeks to refine how content can be suggested on the site. As a LinkedIn coach I would love to see more content in Twitter about LinkedIn. I can use the lists and Hashtags to keep track of content on specific topics but I am sure Twitter can do it better.
More time on the site
If Twitter can get in right with their surprise on search and discovery, we will spend more time on the site, which gives the corporates more time to target us with their ads. More money flows into Twitter’s coffers, we the users get more relevant content, the corporates are happy. I guess everyone is happy at the end of the day. Well let’s see what happens as eyes focus on Twitter. Whatever the developments are at Twitter, everyone will be watching closely to see what the fuss is all about.