Google news has started mining Twitter to flesh out their latest news headline results, including displaying your tweets as “latest news” mixed in with the news headlines, in a rolling marquee that does an autorefresh much like a Facebook page does.
A perfect, albeit sad, example is today’s news that actor Andrew Koenig – son of Walter Koenig, who played Checkov in the original Star Trek – was found dead of an apparent suicide, in a park in Vancouver. As thousands tweeted about the sad event, their tweets started showing up in Google News along with news headlines about Koenig.
Almost immediately, as the news spread across not only traditional and Internet media, but also through Twitter, Google News started featuring the Twittered message (tweets) about Koenig mixed in with the regular news headlines, in the Google News ‘Latest Results’ section.
Each of these screen shots were taken seconds apart, in the same section of the Google News page, as it auto-refreshed. Note the “Pause” link which allows you to pause the auto-refresh:
A headline from Pop Sugar Australia, along with a Twitter message:
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Then it autorefreshes, and shows a Twitter message along with a headline from DigitalJournal.com:
Another autorefresh, and a few more Twitter messages mixed in with a headline from Des Pardes:
Click on the “Latest Results” link (in this case “Latest Results for ‘Andrew Koenig'”) and you are taken to a full page – note the Twitter message (highlighted by us with a red box) intermingled with the news headlines (highlighted with an orange box) and, again, a “Pause” link to stop the autorefresh:
So how about it, Twitter tweeters – how do you feel about Google using your personal messages to pad out their Google News results?
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That they are ‘my tweets’ is not a big thing. People who are sending out messages choose to be hidden/”protected” or not. If they were scraping hidden users somehow, now that would be a Bad Thing.
The problem I see is giving the banal garbage most people tweet the same weight as news. Completely ridiculous as most of it all is content free. Would be best if GOOG put an ‘include social media’ as a tickbox for the news search.
Anyone who uses a social networking site should realize what they write is not private. And why should it be? Tweets are searchable already, as are news groups and many email groups.
If you don’t want it display to the public, don’t put it out there.
I think that this should not be allowed unless Google has an agreement in place with Twitter. If there *is* an agreement, Twitter should post a very prominently placed message somewhere letting Twitterers know that their tweets are considered news by Google