Have you claimed your Twitter feed on Technorati profile yet? This may be the perfect time to do so because Technorati is now indexing Twitter. It heatens up the debate whether Twitter is a form of blogging or not. I previously wrote that Google Blog Search defines the the blogosphere by technology by including everything that publishes a site feed in their index. According to Google a blog is anything that publishes a site feed and syndicates. It comes as no surprise then that tweets are showing up in Google Alerts.

Technorati seems to allow anything that publishes a site feed to be claimed, including your Twitter account. So how do you claim your Twitter feed on Technorati? It is just as easy as claiming any other blog, just read Twitter everywhere it says “blogs” or “blog software” or follow these steps:

1. Go to the blogs tab in your account
2. Claim a blog/Twitter account by providing the blog URL, for example: http://www.twitter.com/blogherald and begin claim.
   You may encounter an error stating that the Technorati Monster has escaped again, ignore it and simply try again. Technorati’s infrastructure does not seem to be build for the amount of requests it receives.
3. Activate your claim by pasting the provided HTML code in your Twitter update field and press update.
4. Done!

By claiming your Twitter profile on Technorati your tweets will be indexed. Yes, all of them, including the ones that say “brb, need coffee.” This means that there is a need to separate the wheat from the chaff as a lot of “breaking news” in the blogosphere is moving to Twitter.

With a potentially massive amount of indexable tweets the question arises if Google and Technorati can handle the maturing blogosphere? This question has become even more relevant now that Technorati is indexing Twitter. Joery Bruijntjes wonders why is Technorati is indexing Twitter? because

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.

Conversations are all about links and the amount of metadata in Twitter is limited to only 140 characters, or is it? Andy Beard describes how Twitter “also has a blogroll of sorts” in the form of “links on the sidebar to the people you are following which are links Technorati can see.” The blogosphere thrives on links but Beard describes how Technorati may not be able to cope with this new situation if “Twitter user like Robert Scoble with 100s, actually over 1000 followers” start claiming their feed and Joery Bruijntjes also points to Technorati’s vulnerability:

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.

So why would Technorati index Twitter? Andy Beard provides at least one good reason:

Robert’s Twitter feed is legitimate content on a different platform, and that people are choosing to link to him from their “Twitter Rolls”

Are you providing interesting, informative or legitimate on Twitter? Have you claimed your profile yet?