Google tricks & Other Tutorials

If anything, 2009 is the year of Twitter. With so many companies embracing Twitter to improve their external communication, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Google is riding the wave with a whopping 50 Twitter accounts used to tweet countless stories each day promoting Google’s many products.

Unless you have been sleeping under a rock lately, you know how big Twitter has become. Despite the fact that the popular micro-blogging service has been around for quite a while, it looks like all stars have aligned for Twitter in 2009, when the service exploded into public consciousness.

Corporations, media outlets, and users around the world all took advantage of the technology so Twitter links on corporate and personal sites, even blogs, quickly became the norm. Businesses were among the first to realize that Twitter is an effective, instant, and affordable communication channel with a very broad reach. Although corporate Twitter channels are nothing unusual these days, we’ve been surprised discovering popular Twitter has been with Google.

According to a post on the official Googl e blog, the search giant maintains nearly 50 Twitter accounts, each dedicated to a specific product. In addition, each Google’s account on Twitter is tied to a product’s official blog, tweeting short leads linked to specific blog entries. Official Google accounts on Twitter include Reader, Blogger, Calendar, News, YouTube, Earth, AdSense, and other product-focused accounts, as well as user tips, central Google account, news from Google localized for non-English markets, etc. Here’s how Google justified its assault on Twitter:

Like lots of you, we’ve been drawn into Twitter this year. After all, we’re all about frequent updates ourselves, and there’s lots happening around here that we want to share with you. Of course, we enjoy watching, and contributing to, the tweetstream (we hope you find our tweets useful, too). Because there are many programs and initiatives across the company, we’ve got a number of active accounts.

Check out this cherry-picked list of Google accounts on Twitter that you may like:

• Central Google - twitter.com/Google
• Google Reader - twitter.com/GoogleReader
• Google Blogger - twitter.com/Blogger
• Google Calendar - twitter.com/GoogleCalendar
• Google Earth - twitter.com/GoogleEarth
• Google Webmaster Central - twitter.com/GoogleWMC
• YouTube - twitter.com/YouTube

Complete list available at the official Google blog.

Christian’s opinion:

As a reporter, I’ve noticed this new trend emerging a while ago, with companies using official Twitter accounts to communicate with journalists and PR agencies. Media, corporations, and consumers all benefit from the Twitter technology. News items beamed via Twitter get out of the door fast, reaching subscribed journalists and PR agencies instantly. Needless to say, instantaneous short messaging is exactly how journalist prefer getting the latst information. Because each tweet is linked to an official press release on a company’s web site, these tweets augment other communication channels already in place, rather than replace them.

Because the media gets news items as they happen, they can react swiftly, providing consumers with up-to-date information. In fact, it’s my personal opinion that tweets will overtake RSS feeds down the road as a preferred technology used by journalists for staying up-to-date.

However, the real problem with Twitter, in my opinion, is this information overload. With so many channels to follow, Twitter.com should offer tools for organizing subscribed tweets into folders. I only use one Twitter account to track all business and personal tweets but I’m finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with it. Dozens of iPhone developers, tech companies and PR agencies to whose Twitter channel I’ve subscribed to beam dozens of tweets a day. Yet, Twitter.com lacks tools that would help me bring order to this mess. I simply don’t have the time to waste on sorting through so many different tweets.

Hey Twitter, can we have some kind of folders or categories that automatically file specific tweets? Yes, I know, there are countless desktop and mobile Twitter clients that bring such a functionality but I’d really like to see this implemented on the Twitter.com website as the default feature.