Will the Stream follow the Web?

This article was in my Twine feed this morning (BTW, if you haven't signed up at Twine yet - do it now!). An excerpt:

The Web lives on top of the Internet's infrastructure much like software and documents live on top of an operating system on a computer. And just as the Web once emerged on top of the Internet, now something new is emerging on top of the Web: I call this the Stream. The Stream is what the Web is thinking and doing, right now. It's our collective stream of consciousness.

So is the stream yet another step toward our ultimate evolution to a soulless Borg-like existence? Well, not exactly. But yes.

[Is the Stream what comes after the Web?]

Will Twitter's new search capabilities kill social bookmarking?

Last week, Twitter's VP of Operations Santosh Jayaram confirmed that Twitter Search will soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages.

The goal is to make Twitter Search a much more complete index of what's happening in real time on the Web and make it an even more credible competitor to Google Search for people looking for very timely content, according to Rafe Needleman of CNET Webware.

According to Needleman, who was moderating a panel at the time, Jayaram told the audience and later confirmed that Twitter Search will also soon get a "reputation" ranking system. When you do a search on a "trending" topic--a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar--Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank the search results in part based on that.

This is a potentially game changing upgrade to Twitter search. The major drawback to social bookmarking is its vulnerability to manipulation, something marketers are catching on to and treating tagging like another form of SEO. A Twitter-based reputation ranking system, depending on how it's executed, could lend great credibility to the indexed sites and articles. I'm more likely to pay attention to an article, blog, new app or event about social media that, say, Tim O'Reilly tweets about than I am content that anonymous Diggers have tagged.

Thoughts? Do Digg, Stumbleupon, reddit, etc. have reason to worry?

[CNET]