Why Google should be worried about twitter?

It is rather uncommon to see a Google's officer to attack competitors, but this is exactly what Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO did. An he did in a rather surprising way: calling twitter it "a poor man's email system" because it lacks all the basic capabilities of a full flagged email like gmail. It is unconceivable that he mistakes Twitter with an email. What he did was just spread some FUD about Twitter. But why Google, with above the 100 million email accounts even bothers to acknowledge the existence of Twitter, with its modest 5 millions users?

In this declining economy inversion in advertising is decreasing and advertisers are looking for better channels. Twitter has demonstrated that it can be used in very innovative ways for marketing. For viral campaigns, for personalized advertising, for brand creation, to receive user feed back. And at least by know, the price is quite low: free!

Also, Twitter users seams to handle commercial messages rather well, maybe because they are easily integrated in the message flow and also conveniently filtered, searched, aggregated, etc. More over, advertisers use Twitter as a truly bidirectional channel not only to advertisers,but also to gather feedback.

It is expected that if Twitter wants to continue in business, it must start charging for commercial usage. It is not clear how, but there are already some interesting ideas.

Twitter has still a long path to follow before threaten Google's dominance. This wouldn't be the first time this happens. One comes easily to mind: when Google came from nowhere and displaced Yahoo. And you know, history has some tendency to repeat itself.