It was probably just a slip of the tongue, but these things can often be significant.
Asked about Twitter at the Morgan Stanley technology conference in San Francisco today, Eric Schmidt pointed out that Google had just started an account on the service, so now you could get messages from Google “in 160 characters or less.”
160? By our calculations, that’s about 14 per cent more than Twitter actually allows. The Google CEO’s other comments about Twitter also suggested he had not spent too long pondering the significance of the service.
This was his general observation about services like Twitter (which included Google’s own Jaiku, before the company put it out to pasture earlier this year):
I view all of these as poor man’s email systems.
Eventually, these light-weight communication systems will evolve and become more like full-blown email services, he said, while email services – including Gmail – will add more of the functions of a Twitter.
Surely, though, this is to misunderstand greatly what keeps Twitter’s users tweeting. It is not a one-to-one communication system: it is a one-to-many broadcast system. That makes it more like YouTube than email. It’s a place for people to think out loud, in public, and to share links.
There has been growing speculation about whether Twitter will get bought by one of the internet powers. Facebook made an aborted buy-out attempt last year. One conclusion to draw from Mr Schmidt’s apparent lack of interest in the Twitter phenomenon is that Google certainly hasn’t been camped out on the start-up’s lawn with an offer of its own.
