So there has been a lot of buzz this week revolving around the launch of the new Twitter home page, which features trending topics that are hot at the moment, hot for that current day, and hot this week, as well as a hot this month.  But more importantly Twitter’s home page is now dominated by a search feature.  The new focus on search has people talking about Twitter being the next big thing in search when it comes to real time search and discovery engines, but in all honesty I don’t think it means a damn thing.

Sure it’s fancy, it shows trends and it’s NEW, but how many of you are actually using twitter.com to do anything that involves twitter?  Most serious twitter users are using programs like TweetDeck.  I personally use Twitterfox while on the computer and UberTwitter on my Blackberry.  The only time I ever visit Twitter.com is to add or remove people.  Unless you are visiting Twitter’s website everytime you manage your tweets I don’t see this feature being used too often.

Overall I think, much like everything in the search and social community, it’s new, it’s shiny, and it’s something to get overly excited about.  But there really isn’t any true value there yet.  Real time search is only really good for news and entertainment at the moment and even then there is no control over the value and relevance of the content presented.  On the flipside if you’re doing buzz monitoring or monitoring your brand you might find some value in this newly revamped homepage, but honestly I don’t think it’s worth the hype its getting.

What are your thoughts?  Have you used the new Twitter homepage?  Did it add any value to your Twitter experience?

So for the last couple of days I’ve had to do some Google Local listings for clients and I noticed that Google has perhaps reverted back to it’s old phone verification process.  For some time now you were given the option to have Google call you immediately or in 5 minutes.  However, upon clicking finish when adding or updating a list and selecting phone verificationI have since been receiving the following screen:

Seems that Google has gotten a bit impatient with the whole phone verification process, which sucks for those of us who need to follow up with the client first.  The good news is that you can still go back in and request the call again later, but I’m pretty sure one of my clients has gotten two random calls in the last couple of days wondering why the hell they are getting an automated PIN via phone.  Shame, shame Google!

UPDATE: Upon doing some more work with the listings it now appears that Google has changed the phone verification process completely.  In the past you would get a PIN and enter it when they called you.  Now, instead, they call you with the PIN and you have to input it online.  Talk about a pain when it comes to setting these up for clients!

I had the chance to toy around with Wolfram Alpha today following its launch and I can say that this is definitely a different breed of search engine.  It’s not cutesy like Google, it’s not as “user friendly” if you will, and it’s surely not something the general public is going to run to.  It is however a tool that can be greatly useful, assuming you know how to find what you’re looking for.

One of the main things I was noticing today both personally and through chatter on twitter, is that a lot of people weren’t finding the results they had hoped for while running various queries through the new search engine.  The reason for this is simple; we’ve all been trained to use search engines like Google, Live, Yahoo, and even Ask.  Most people are used to typing in a keyword or 20 and hoping to be given a list of results that are “relevant”.  With Wolfram Alpha, this doesn’t work.  Sure, one out of twenty random queries you type in may get you a result, but that’s not the purpose of Wolfram Alpha.

Wolfram Alpha is exactly what it says it is; a computational knowledge engine.  Its job isn’t to find you a local pizza joint, or online porn (However if you type in a few pornographic terms I did find it will give you some amusing data).  Instead it’s designed to compute and compare data in a way that most search engines can’t.  Run a search for ‘google.com live.com yahoo.com’ in any other search engine and you’ll get thousands of pages with random information.  Run that same query in Wolfram Alpha and you’ll get a comparison of the three search engines with data on when they went live, where they are located, how many employees each search engine has, and a lot more.

Wolfram Alpha is the information geek’s search engine.  If you crave data, computation, and the like, THIS is your search engine.  When running queries you need to think in this mindset.  If you look for pizza it’s going to give you information about pizza, not a list of your local pizza restaurants.  If you look up Starbucks it won’t tell you where to find a quick latte, but it will tell you how Starbucks is doing in the stock market.

Don’t use Wolfram Alpha the way you would use Google, Live, Yahoo, or any other search engine, you’ll only be irritated and disappointed.

Still Not Sure What To Do With Wolfram Alpha?

I think this twitter user shares your frustration:

However, if you need something to tide you over check out Mashable’s post with the Top 10 Wolfram Alpha easter eggs.  Be sure to check out the comments because users are finding even more.  Twitter user NMcCoy also mentioned that Wolfram Alpha does a great job at helping with statistics homework if needed.  If that still doesn’t tide you over, go here.