I love it when tech companies start acting like bickering exes. This morning Google announced that it was gasp going to start mixing its chocolate Google+ results into your peanut butter normal search results, optionally of course. Twitter wasn’t happy with this because Twitter and Google were totally dating for a year and nine months until they broke up last July.
Feeling threatened (because these Google+ results will inevitably drive valuable traffic back to Google’s own properties), Twitter was all like,”We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”
Google was then like, “Wait a minute, weren’t you the one to leave first?” or more accurately with this (verbatim) statement on Google+ “We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.”
As far as I can see, this is the first time that either company has blamed the other publicly for the non-renewal. According to one source Twitter just put a number on the new deal that was “too ridiculous” (under $100 million but still “a lot.”), so from Twitter’s perspective, it could look like Google wasn’t accepting its terms.
Twitter hasn’t responded to Google’s response yet. I hope it’ll be through a tweet.
Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
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