While some observers have argued that Twitter has made a major step in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) field following its bolt-on acquisition of Whetlab, there remains doubts that its strategy will actually work out — it will likely favour Google instead, in my view.
Trends
The attempt to apply machine learning processes to customers’ 
preferences is nothing new.
It’s early days to say whether Twitter will fall on its feet, but other news this week points to a similar direction in strategy: Google is rumoured to be interested in Tesco’s customer loyalty arm Dunnhumby, it emerged yesterday.
Data is important, and getting more accurate information in order to be able to predict trends more accurately could be vital for survival — with the big difference, however, that Google is a search engine with dominant market position worldwide, while Twitter is just a social platform that has lost $10bn of value in less than two months of trade.
Is Twitter In Structural Decline?
This topic could be discussed in a lengthy research paper. Here are three key points:
- Twitter’s AI deal responds to the need of reducing storage space (read: costs), giving its users the possibility to receive customised, targeted tweets that will hopefully generate more ads revenue. Most of the targeted audience uses Google in first place, however, and Google controls the distribution chain.
- Google controls and distributes websites’ listings on its own engine. Twitter does not have a competitive edge here, of course.
- Twitter’s enhanced data will ultimately provide Google with more insight, which will reinforce Google’s dominant position by providing it with additional data that will likely boost its own ad business.
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