Plaxo has slowly been upgrading their network to be more of a social network, and it’s actually growing on me. Plaxo’s been around for ages and at one point it irritated the hell out of me because of their covert tactics to increase their network. It felt as if one didn’t have a choice in the early days and the emails were intrusive, but I think as social media grew, people are more open to share their profiles and business contact information.

And now, it’s quite intriguing to browse through the ‘possible people you might know’ and connect again. The nice thing is that I’m finding people that I have dealt with professionally years ago (because of Plaxo’s age) and linking up again.

In the current economic times, this is great. It will be interesting to see whether they can compete with Linked In over time as I think they are doing something right at the moment…

It has been confirmed that Google is in talks with Twitter about a real time search engine. This would bring about a lot of value to search results, but also some concerns about how it would be managed.

Twitter unfortunately don’t have a current way of deferring spam, except for a subtle reporting of abuse via email or @abuse tweet. What will keep shady marketers from continuously polling twitter on certain topics to increase traffic?

I am however certain of the fact that Google will employ various algorythms to weed out spam, as they’re doing with conventional search results, but it will be interesting to see how they go about it.

I don’t think an outright sale is on the cards, but we could well see a live feed being sourced to Google for producing faster results. As mentioned in the Tech Crunch article, if Google doesn’t receive a live feed the feasibility of such a deal will be worse off, as Twitter depend on real time results and that is what will make it most useful to Google Users.

Things to keep in mind on integration:

• Will there be a limit on frequency of Tweets by unique users indexed or frequency on a specific topic/keyword?
• Will users be able to reply/retweet etc directly from Google Results (if they’re logged into Twitter)?
• Will power users have the ability to track topics (this will be great – maybe with Google Alerts)?
• How will the integration impact Twitters current ability to manage traffic / uptime?
• Give me your thoughts!