Bryan Person's Blog: Worth reading

Twitter is evolving into a powerful search engine.

My friend Mitch Joel even muses today that Twitter is "going after Google," and I have a story of my own today that illustrates why he just might be onto something.



I snapped this photo yesterday while visiting the Lakewood Church in Houston. Lakewood is the largest church in North America, welcoming more than 40,000 visitors and members through its doors each week. It also broadcasts a portion of its service across the US and to dozens of countries around the world every Sunday.

But for as big and well known as Lakewood may be, neither its content-rich website nor Google were much help for me this morning, when I was trying to remember the name of the singers on stage in the picture above.

Enter Twitter. A search on the song's name, "Strong Tower," provided me with a link to the answer.

I followed this tweet ...



... to a blog post from a Lakewood member who had recorded the live stream of the service and had posted the performance of the very song I'd found so uplifting! (The names of the vocalists, if you're wondering, were Aaron Rodriguez and Seth Perez.)



Twitter is sitting on a gold mine of tweets that contain the stories, opinions, random/idol thoughts, and passions of millions of people around the world. I think we're only beginning to scratch the surface of how this rich data can be tapped into through search.

There has to be a business model around that.