Outside of Gmail, Googlers don’t seem to have been doing much with their 20% time recently. Perhaps they’ve been spending one day a week looking at the fuss everyone is making over Twitter, because the big G now has something to show for its famous policy: Google News Timeline.
It’s a new feature you can test out in Google Labs now that aggregates News search results by more than just topic. You can see how headlines have evolved over days and weeks, or zero in on a specific topic or type of publication.
I mentioned Twitter though not just because it’s a web 2.0 phenomenon, but because Google News Timeline come within a tweet’s breadth of the microblogging platform’s USP: realtime news and search.
The problem with Google News Timeline is that search by the day, week or month isn’t enough. I’d like to see closer almagamation of stories, and the ability to even chart stories and updates by the second. Liveblogs are a big part of what we do on ElectricPig, and as a reader I’d like to see collection of these in Google News.
Twitter isn’t without its flaws of course. Twitter Search is clumsy compared to apps like Twitterfall. But if you’re following the right people, you can find out what’s happening first, fast. Not even Twitter’s founders seem to have figured out the direction that the service will eventually go, but right now we’ve got a wonderful mess of a community embracing it. It’s that that Google News Timeline is still missing, and Labs developers need to do more to make up for that.