That’s rather lame, and no wonder I haven’t been seeing realtime results tonight. And really, they needed to disable the whole thing to test out integration with Google+?
Considering how pathetic the Twitter search is, Google Realtime, and its timeline view have saved me many a time in trying to find old tweets, and it’s been fantastic in trying to determine whether issues I currently have with a service or website are shared by others across the web, the most recent example being Tumblr’s genius idea to remove the importing of RSS feeds >.<
What does incorporating it into Google+ mean? If I’m limited to just Google+ public posts, as The Next Web speculates—or maybe I’m reading them wrong—I’d be pretty disappointed. Is it going to add some usefulness to the near useless Sparks feature? Then again, I don’t know how else they’d incorporate tweets and the like into the main Google+ stream, considering the level of noise that already exists.
Regardless, how hard is it for these tech companies to communicate effectively with users of their products? People are using it, you know, and with no timeframe of when it’ll be back, if at all, this rather abrupt termination ain’t doing much for you guys /facepalm
Taking features from your main search and trying to throw them into Google+ in the hope of getting more users to use it seems pretty stupid to me, if that is indeed what you’re trying to achieve, because, you know, I speculate so well on the tech industry and all…
I’d love to wake up tomorrow and eat my words when some fantastic new implementation of real-time search within Google+ goes live though!
UPDATE:
Turns out Google had an agreement with Twitter from 2009 to carry its results, and that expired July 2.
Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on July 2.
While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that’s publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google.
I’d think Google would have wanted to continue said agreement, unless they feel Google+ is going to give them a strong enough source of real-time data, and I doubt Twitter wouldn’t have wanted to renew it unless they’re looking to offer hugely improved search functionality they want to keep exclusive to themselves.
UPDATE #2:
And yet again, Danny Sullivan kills it with a fantastic summary of the state of play between Google, Twitter and real time search.
But we’ve decided in all, we’re OK with the current state of things.
Google’s Amit Singhal. Guess Google feel they’re ok without Twitter, even though they shut down Realtime since it so heavily depended on Twitter for its content.
c0up 
Been noticing a lot of good conversation on the public G+ stream lately, especially from industry experts. Its all about the user base though, and if it gets enough traction then the real time search with G+ is going to be incredibly useful. One other thing I’ve noticed with G+ is the type of users on it. I feel that there are more industry experts getting involved in posting content which is facilitating conversation with every day joe blows like myself. Its like a mashup of Quora and Twitter Lists, extremely useful and stimulating conversation happening and easy to follow via circles. I just hope its not a ‘hype’ bubble and that the current user base disappears as the novelty wears off.Would be disappointing if they don’t renew the Twitter agreement though.
God yes. I am really, really liking the conversation in Google+. I hate carrying a conversation on Twitter, and the G+ audience, at the moment anyway, as you say, is fantastic!I really do hope it does continue, as it’s a great medium for it.