There’s a lot of talk floating around about Google and Twitter at the moment; John Battelle explains why Twitter is the YouTube of realtime search and states the case for why Google should acquire the company:

“It’s an asset Google cannot afford to not own, and also, one they most likely do not have the ability (or brand permission) to build on their own. (Remember, Google tried to build its own YouTube – Google Video – and it failed to get traction. A service like Twitter is community driven, and Google has never been really great at that part of the media business).”

Staci Kramer at paidContent thinks Battelle has a point:

“Given that I’ve made as many searches on Twitter in the last 24 hours as on Google, in my own echo chamber he makes a lot of sense. I think mobile search is ahead in terms of importance though—and that the real breakthrough will be a true meshing of the two.”

Chris O’Brien writing for Silicon Valley’s Mercury News says it’s absurd to imagine that Twitter has Google freaked (though Google itself has now launched an official Twitter account), but adds:

“But the fact that Twitter’s potential to disrupt the search market is being seriously discussed shows just how quickly the sands can shift under the feet of even a colossus like Google.
Very quietly, one of Twitter’s most powerful applications has become its ability to allow people to conduct real-time searches.

The emergence of real-time search also certainly says a lot about us, and how our increasingly wired society is becoming ever more hyperkinetic. In this world, compared with Twitter, Google suddenly begins to feel old and plodding. Its search results might be minutes, hours, or even days old. Yawn!

Typically, when such goliaths are slain, it’s because they failed to recognize the threat and make the necessary changes until it was too late. So, it’ll be interesting to see how Google — or even if Google — feels the need to throw some kind of counterpunch. In theory, Google has created a culture to keep it flexible and innovative. On the other hand, its track record of new products has been a bit lackluster.”

Elsewhere on the web:

Dan Zarella, creator of the TweetSuite Twitter plugins for WordPress, has an interesting take on the classis, with a post on what the Homeric poems and oral tradition can teach us about social marketing.

Shiv Singh at Razorfish loves how inherently social Recovery.gov – a US government site detailing how money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is being spent.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb deconstructs the word-of-mouth phenomenon that has driven international growth for US crafts ecommerce site Etsy.