Welcome to the brave new world of Twitter, Big G!
Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has been Twittering for less than two days, but it can already boast more than 25,000 followers. William Shatner, who has been a user since last June, has only 21,300 people following his every whim. Well done, Google!
Keep at it and you might catch Al Gore's 191,000 followers someday. Hey, you guys seem to be pretty tight with the almost-president -- maybe he can share a few Twittering tips the next time he's announcing a major Google product?
But of course, the brand-spanking-new, official @Google account isn't Mountain View's first venture into Twitterland. @AdWordsHelper has been spreading the word of Google's advertising operations and helping out users since September, the @youtube account opened in August, and @googledata has been at it for a year already. "Google Data APIs for the win!"
It even looks like Google had a Twitter strategy in mind all along. Obscure products like Google's programming APIs (what @googledata is for) and @googleapps went live well before the main Google account. And I don't know whether anybody at Google actually follows the Tweets in that main account, but it's made some interesting choices among the fellow feeds it follows.
Chief among those are Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) @Live_Search account and the official Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) entry. There seems to be a congenial spirit among the official Twitterers, as the search operators exchange the occasional "thank you" or "welcome", complete with smiley faces and everything. Keep your friends close, but your enemies on your "Following" list, I suppose.
Those are the only corporate Twitter feeds in @google's friend list. No mention of Time Warner's (NYSE:TWX) AOL, or Ask.com parent IAC/InterActive (NASDAQ:IACI), though both already have accounts. It's clear who Google sees as its competition: Only the big boys need apply. The rest of the Google account's 58 feeds belong to other Google properties, tech journalists (but none of us Fools), and technology news from the CNet News people.
OK, CNet is a CBS (NYSE:CBS) property, but I don't think that Google necessarily sees CBS as competition -- yet.
Tweet on, Big G. I'll be listening, along with some 20,000 of my closest friends (and counting).
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