Just like a decade ago before Google came on the scene, the web was a mess. It was relatively easy to find “short tail” content like news, weather and sports but Google really solved the long tail which made the web infinitely more useful. There are billions of pages, thousands of new sites popping up every day and that continues. Without Google, it would be impossible to make sense of it all. They changed that in a big way. Twitter is starting to change the way again that we share and consume information but its a mess. There are so many tools to make it easy to auto-tweet and retweet and follow people, its impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff. Lists, a recent feature of Twitter, have helped but there is still too much noise on Twitter to find interesting and useful information. Twitter search is time based so it shows you the most recent but gives no other ranking to the tweets. Just like Google has their PageRank algorithm, Twitter (or someone) needs to come up with a TweetRank algorithm to help surface the most interesting tweets. I know Google, Yahoo and MSFT have all incorporated tweets into their search results but this hasn’t done much as of yet in my opinion. Someone will figure this out and they will profit largely from it I’m sure but if they don’t Twitter runs the risk of its success leading to its demise. Help separate the tweets from the chaff, its an opportunity waiting for some smart MIT nerds to jump on it.