Microblogging has become highly popular in recent years. While you may not be sure what microblogging is, you most likely already use a form of it. Microblogging is the sharing of information through short messages that are posted on an online platform where others will see them. Basically, it is blogging and instant messaging all rolled into one package. For example, Twitter is a highly popular form of microblogging.
This kind of microblogging can then be crawled and tracked by Google like blog posts, websites, etc. online. Once crawled, the content can appear in Google search results for related topics. However, this process always takes time to accomplish. This means that a microblog post may not appear in a search for a topic until a couple of months after it was originally posted.
An article published on February 5, 2015, announced that Twitter made a deal with Google that would allow Google access to Twitter’s near real-time stream of data, the firehose. This is significant because it means that Twitter’s form of microblog posts, Tweets, would be able to appear in subject related Google search results almost immediately after the Tweets are originally posted. This gives Twitter the opportunity to get more of it’s content seen in places outside its main website or app. Although Twitter already had a similar deal in place with Yahoo and Bing, sharing their data with Google will allow Twitter to have more of their content seen by a much broader audience than they had access to previously.