Real-time search is all the rage these days. Everywhere I turn (well, on the internet, at least), I see something about how Twitter is going to change everything. How we search, how we interact, how we make friends, everything. I've been skeptical, to say the least. Wasn't Cuil supposed to beat Google? Whoops.

Now, I'm a believer. Twitter isn't going to replace Google anytime soon, but there are two important niches it fills, and I think it's pretty unique in both of these regards.

The first is as a sounding board. I didn't stay up to watch the Oscar's, but I still wanted to know what happened. My default approach is to Google this the next morning. The only problem with this is I basically get Wikipedia and a bunch of variations on it. I don't care about that: all I want is to not sound like a idiot at lunch. Twitter only reported what peopled wanted to talk about. Heath Ledger won best male actor? Slumdog Millionaire won 8 awards? Wikipedia has 16 pages on the 81st Academy Awards - I don't want to dig through that! I saw what I needed to know in the 1st 15 tweets. Twitter may be a bit of a echo chamber, but that's the point. All self-selecting communities are, and Twitter is certainly no exception.

Aside from news, you can find people who are thinking about the same things you are, right now. I've latched on to Mercurial as my DVCS of choice, but I still get this nagging feeling that I'm not using it properly. Twitter didn't fix this, but searching for Mercurial led me to hgtab, a shell extension for auto-completing mercurial commands. It's actually really useful! Searching Google for the same thing gives me a lot of relevant pages, but they're all things I've seen before: how to convert from SVN, git vs Mercurial (really? again?), their home page. Relevant information, to be sure. But stale. Twitter was fresh.

Let's be clear: for real knowledge, Twitter is useless. But if you want to know what people are talking about, it's not a bad place to go.