Google Realtime loses Twitter feed, will replace with Google+

By Jeff Hughes July 4, 2011

Yesterday, Google’s Real-time Search went missing and the URL returned a 404 error. Apparently, the company took it down because it is planning on retooling the feature due to an expired contract with Twitter as well as because of the recent release of the Google+ social networking service.

Real-time Search was a feature that included news updates from Facebook fan pages, Gowalla, Quora, MySpace, Google News links, Me2day, Jaiku and many more social networking sites, but Twitter was the most dominant in this service. With Twitter gone, the content left behind may not have seemed enough to patch up the hole left by the San Francisco based mini-blogging service.

According to Searchengineland, since October 2009 Google had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates through a special feed but on July 2 that contract expired and the company couldn’t access the Twitter feed anymore. Google took the service down yesterday to rethink their strategy.

The company says that once Google Real-time Search comes back from hiatus it will integrate Google+ content, though the timeframe for the relaunch is uncertain right now. The company also says that Google+ content will share Real-time Search with third-party content: “Our vision is to have google.com/real-time include Google+ information along with other real-time data from a variety of sources.”

With Google+ the company isn’t as hard up for social networking as they were in 2009 measuring up against competition such as Microsoft. Searchengineland comments that Twitter still needs Google’s archive search, though Bing seems to still be in business with Twitter with their Social Search. Both Google and Twitter agree, in statements, that business was good and plan on collaborations in the future. Google says that Twitter information which is publicly available to their crawlers is still discoverable by the search engine.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Web
Google

Former Digital Trends Contributor

I'm a SF Bay Area-based writer/ninja that loves anything geek, tech, comic, social media or gaming-related.

Social Media

Bluesky barrels toward 1 million new sign-ups in a day

Social media app Bluesky has picked nearly a million new users just a day after exiting its invitation-only beta and opening to everyone.

In a post on its main rival -- X (formerly Twitter) -- Bluesky shared a chart showing a sudden boost in usage on the app, which can now be downloaded for free for iPhone and Android devices.

Computing

How to make a GIF from a YouTube video

woman sitting and using laptop

Sometimes, whether you're chatting with friends or posting on social media, words just aren't enough -- you need a GIF to fully convey your feelings. If there's a moment from a YouTube video that you want to snip into a GIF, the good news is that you don't need complex software to so it. There are now a bunch of ways to make a GIF from a YouTube video right in your browser.

If you want to use desktop software like Photoshop to make a GIF, then you'll need to download the YouTube video first before you can start making a GIF. However, if you don't want to go through that bother then there are several ways you can make a GIF right in your browser, without the need to download anything. That's ideal if you're working with a low-specced laptop or on a phone, as all the processing to make the GIF is done in the cloud rather than on your machine. With these options you can make quick and fun GIFs from YouTube videos in just a few minutes.
Use GIFs.com for great customization
Step 1: Find the YouTube video that you want to turn into a GIF (perhaps a NASA archive?) and copy its URL.

Social Media

I paid Meta to ‘verify’ me — here’s what actually happened

In the fall of 2023 I decided to do a little experiment in the height of the “blue check” hysteria. Twitter had shifted from verifying accounts based (more or less) on merit or importance and instead would let users pay for a blue checkmark. That obviously went (and still goes) badly. Meanwhile, Meta opened its own verification service earlier in the year, called Meta Verified.

Mostly aimed at “creators,” Meta Verified costs $15 a month and helps you “establish your account authenticity and help[s] your community know it’s the real us with a verified badge." It also gives you “proactive account protection” to help fight impersonation by (in part) requiring you to use two-factor authentication. You’ll also get direct account support “from a real person,” and exclusive features like stickers and stars.