Over at SEOMoz, Darren Slatten has a hilarious takedown of the twitter-search hype.

Here’s what he’s missing: he’s exaggerating the importance of Twitter, but Pagerank is gradually giving way to Participationrank: how much interaction and attention a person gets, rather than how many links a page gets.

Yes, it’s easy to overstate Twitter’s role in this. But can you really imagine a future in which Google is going to give more authority the often-linked rather than the often talked-about?

For example, consider a steel industry expert who gets quoted by news outlets every day, but has a site with basically no content and absolutely no updates. Does Google a) assume that this person is less influential than a blogger writing about the same subject, because the blogger gets more links, or b) assume that the expert is more influential, and that Google’s algorithm should catch up?

Twitter isn’t necessarily the medium that will make a difference, but Google is going to incorporate attention of all kinds when deciding how important someone is. Slatten is dead wrong when he dismisses this: in the future, someone who gets poked a lot on Facebook, has lots of teammates on an online game, or gets constantly retweeted, will be treated as more important by Google (if only when talking about those subjects).

If Google doesn’t doesn’t learn to incorporate social influence rather than just links, someone else will. Why not?