I recently noticed Technorati has been indexing Twitter. Given the fact Twitter is considered a form of blogging, it kind of makes sense. It still strikes me odd. I can think of many reasons why Technorati would not index Twitter, but I can only name a few reasons why they would.

For those of you who’ve not been following the news lately, I’ll shortly explain what Twitter is all about. Twitter is -simply put- telling the world what you’re up to in 140 characters. People can “follow you” and receive updates on your whereabouts. The high posting frequency results in a low signal-to-noise ratio, meaning only a small percentage of the “updates” contains useful information.

Now let’s get back to Technorati. As you all know, Technorati’s main function is to map what’s being talked about on the web. To do that accurately, you need to gather a lot of information. Aside from the main article, blogs contain a lot of useful metadata like tags, outbound links, categories and trackbacks.

This kind of data -especially trackbacks and outbound links- is great for tracking conversation across media. You can see this in action on their homepage. They use all this great metadata to try and track what’s being said about news stories in the blogosphere.

Last year news spread that Technorati “temporarily” dropped all content older than six month. To me this says they can’t cope with the enormous amount of data being generated by bloggers. Twitter has far less content to process, but still needs a dozen servers to keep things running.

Knowing that, why would Technorati take on all this extra burden? Surely it can’t be a content-driven desire, as the updates on Twitter contains too little metadata to be of help for linking news stories to the blogosphere. I could understand if they chose to build a separate search engine specifically for Twitter, or simply gave it a unique representation on their site. But they didn’t.

Instead they choose to embed like any other blog; between the main search results. This could be accidental of course, but seeing that Twitter has already been around for like a year, I doubt that. So Technorati is now indexing Twitter like they index regular blogs, and it clues me why. Any ideas?