It was bound to happen. Google is now Twittering too. If you sign up to follow “googlenews” on Twitter, you’ll receive real time updates from Google that are far faster than the five minute auto-refresh cycle of the Google News page.

Google is in some ways reacting to other news organizations that have already jumped on the Twitter broadcast bandwagon. BBCBreaking has 86,000 followers; CBS has 191,000. Breakingnewz goes across news groups and has 27,000 followers.

But the big daddy of real time Twitter news is CNNbrk which has nearly 1.26 million followers. No wonder Google decided to join the fray.

Twitter may find itself eclipsed later this year when Apple unveils the latest software for the iPhone which will be able to receive push notifications. Those may be from Twitter but other apps will undoubtedly join in. Push notifications will be valuable not only for news but advertising of all types, from location based push-ads to automatically updated classified listings.