Why? As research house Jefferies & Co. explains in a research note to clients today, if Twitter hasn’t yet managed to transform its popularity into significant revenue, how will Microsoft (MSFT) or Google (GOOG)?

“While we believe Microsoft pulled off a little bit of a media/PR coup by announcing the Twitter deal and forcing Google to rush into a similar deal, we do not believe Microsoft will be able to capitalize on its first mover advantage in the short run since neither search engines nor Twitter have figured out how to monetize the data streams from Twitters (affectionately known as Tweets),” Jefferies analysts wrote.

“We believe that users focused on real-time data would be less tolerant to advertising,” the research note adds. “That said, we can see new business models emerging down the line where the realtime tweets blended with local information (traffic conditions, flight arrivals, etc.) could be more easily monetized and where ‘premium’ tweets from celebrities could be included for a premium subscription. For now, the real-time data integration would mean more refreshes from the users to get up to the minute updates, which should translate into higher query volume, all else equal.”
 

How nonexclusive is Microsoft’s deal with Twitter?

So nonexclusive that just hours after Microsoft (MSFT) announced it, rival Google (GOOG) lurched forward to say that it has entered into a similar partnership with the San Francisco-based microblogging service.

The search giant may be second to this party, but it’s not going to be late. But make no mistake–this is very clearly a rush job.

Some proof? Microsoft has code running. Google does not.

Twitter and Google announced the deal in posts to their respective company blogs.

“Our friends down in Mountain View want to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Twitter co-founder Evan Williams wrote. “A fast growing amount of information is coursing through Twitter very quickly, and we want there to be many ways to access that information. As part of that effort, we’ve partnered with Google to index the entire world of public tweets as fast as possible and present them to their users in an organized and relevant fashion.”

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search, was similarly enthusiastic about the deal.

“We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months,” Mayer wrote. “That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”

Once Google gets around to indexing Twitter’s real-time data.

Lu also confirmed a similar deal with Facebook.

bing is bringing twitter search to you

October 21, 2009, 10:24 AM by Bing | 0 Comments
One of the most interesting things going on today on the Internet is the notion of the real time web. The idea of accessing data in real time has been an elusive goal in the world of search. Web indexes in search engines update at pretty amazing rates, given what it takes to crawl the entire web and index it for searching, but getting that to “real time” has been challenging.

The explosive popularity of Twitter is the best example of this opportunity. Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine. The power of those tweets as a form of data that can be surfaced in search is enormous. Innovative services like Twitter give us access to public opinion and thoughts in a way that has not before been possible. From important social and political issues to keeping friends up to date on the minute-by-minute of our daily lives, the web is getting more and more real time.

Search needs to keep up. Shortly after we launched Bing, we did an experiment with the team at Twitter, where we took a fairly small number of “celebrities” from Twitter and provided access to their tweets as part of the search result. Here is a great example.

But what if we take that to the next level? What if we indexed basically the whole public Twitter stream and made it available to customers?

We’re glad you asked that. Because today at Web 2.0 we announced that working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now). Try it out. The Bing and Twitter teams want to know what you think.

How does this all work?

Were you as fascinated by the 6-year-old boy floating away in a balloon as we were? Was it a hoax? We know that people are going to twitter more and more for information surrounding all the latest chatter.

You can now search for what people are saying all over the web about breaking news topics, your favorite celebrity, hometown sports team, and anything else you use Twitter to stay on top of today.

If you want to keep an eye on this topic, you can just watch the Tweets roll in. Or, click on “See more Tweets about…” to go to a page full of Tweets. On that page, you can change the ordering to “Best Match.” Here we arrange Tweets differently. If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower. For example, I saw a Tweet from ABC News ranked pretty high in the Best Match mode during the “boy in the balloon” fiasco. By the way, you won’t see any of your tweets if you protected or deleted them, and tweets don’t last more than 7 days in our index.

Are you a Taylor Swift fan? Just think of all the links that are shared on twitter that have to do with Taylor. To help you find these links we sift through and find the most interesting and hot trending links that other search engines usually don’t pick up on. Below you can see a couple of interesting links shared by Twitter users–some news and some gossip.

Instead of the usual captions that are used for links, we decided to give you a “social caption” and show you what people are saying about these links.

Our team has been using this product internally, below are some situations where it came in handy:

Sean Suchter (my boss) and I avoided a closed freeway on a rainy Seattle day and made our flight home.
Eric Scheel (principle program manager on the team) a photo-gear junkie, keeps up on early product reviews and owners’ tweets, which helped him decide on his next purchase.

My wife thinks I am almost cool because I know stuff about Taylor Swift.

We’d love to hear some stories from you about how this may have helped you. Of course, we also want to hear your ideas about how to keep improving this product.

Paul Yiu and the Bing Social Search Team

An interesting claim. Certainly, Palm’s new platform would benefit from some new developers, and offering them a bit of cash to come on board isn’t unprecedented. Remember, KPCB manages a $100 million iFund that’s driving development for the iPhone OS from Apple (AAPL).

But according to the folks I’ve spoken with, Palm isn’t paying developers to write apps for webOS. One source inside Palm dismissed the idea that the company would do so as “rubbish.” Three others in a position to know said they’d never heard of such an incentive. And none of the mobile app developers I’ve contacted have been approached by Palm with such an offer or heard of anyone who has been approached.

Odd, isn’t it? Why would Palm (PALM) offer financial incentives to a developer who created an unreleased civic engagement tool and not to one who offers a popular game? Or a killer productivity app? Or an iTunes App Store top seller?

CitySourced has not responded to repeated requests for comment and clarification.

Gabriel Stricker, Google’s Director of Search Communications kicks things off by noting that the company will be sharing a number of new developments that cater to the growing demands of its users. With that, Udi Manber takes the stage to offer a big-picture overview of search.

Manber says what Google does is the new “rocket science.” Search has to be fast, relevant, and fresh, he explains. But even that’s not enough. The real goal is to solve users’ problems. If users can’t spell, it’s our problem. If the content is there but in a language the user doesn’t speak, that’s our problem. If the Web is too slow, it’s our problem. Manber offers a few examples of how Google works to address these challenges: real-time data, translation, etc. With these services nailed down, he says, Google can move on to the more important task of working on “understanding.”

Manber invites Pat Riley, senior search quality engineer, to the stage to talk a bit about Google’s “did you mean” link. Lots of people use the link, Riley says, and Google has been working to improve it. Called “spellmillion,” the project provides not only related results for a misspelled query but for alternate ones as well (think labor as in “work” and labor as in “pregnancy”). But it requires Google to process multiple searches for a single query and demands a lot of processing power.

Riley notes that the project has been somewhat contentious because it also potentially questions user intent. He offers the example of “Macy Ray.” Some users might be searching for “Macy Gray,” the singer, others for a person actually named “Macy Ray.” How do you address those two potential queries on a single search results page?

Riley is followed by Engineering Director Scott Huffman, whose subject is mobile search. Huffman starts things off with a few truisms. Mobile search is often local. It should be easy to use. Effortless. And it should provide all that Google has to offer. Huffman notes that this is quite a task since Google must optimize its search for different mobile experiences and different user interfaces: Google’s own Android, Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, etc. Some of these platforms require gestures–touch, swipe–others use a keypad. All must provide access to the Web and the mobile Web–sites that have been optimized for mobile devices. On the screen behind him, Huffman displays an example of Google search that displays desktop Web results and mobile Web results, the latter denoted by a red square.

Mobile search must also be easy. Huffman demos a shared desktop-mobile search for a flight number. Since he’s logged into his Google account, his search for “ba 284″ SF-London on the desktop is immediately shared with the Google app on his mobile device. An unreleased feature, but it’s on its way. A quick look at local listings automatically delivered to devices on the basis on GPS/cell tower location, and then Huffman brings Mayer on stage.

Mayer talks a bit about universal search before moving on to Google’s “bento box” of search results. She talks about Google’s focus on the importance of presentation and its efforts to make search results more usable for the user. An example of this SearchWiki, a tool that allows users to annotate their searches, to “keep their train of thought,” says Mayer. We need to help our users find more and do more with it, she says, noting that the company is still working to address some longstanding user problems:

• Finding recent information
• Expressing that you want just one type of result
• Assessing which results are best
• Knowing what you’re looking for
• Expressing your searches in keywords

Mayer introduces Google Search Options, a feature that appends a search option panel to results, allowing users to “slice and dice” the results as they choose. A demo of the feature, in a search for “Hubble Telescope,” allows for search calibration by time, pages that include images, etc. Another search for “solar oven” is filtered down to specific genres–videos, discussion forums, reviews. Click on those links and that new search context is immediately displayed on the page.

Interestingly, the reviews feature uses something called “sentiment analysis” to extract sentiments from a review and present them in displayed snippets.

Search Options also includes a timeline feature that allows users to visualize results over time. And there’s something called “Wonder Wheel,” which presents a visual representation of a query surrounded by potential refinements (hence “Wonder Wheel”). Click on a refinement and results update automatically. Search Options should be going live now, says Mayer.

A bit of geometry monomania here today at Google Searchology. First the Wonder Wheel and now “Google Squared,” a sort of spreadsheet visualization of search being cooked up in Google Labs. Unstructured data pulled directly from search and organized according to the whim of the user. A search for “small dogs” pulls up a lists of–wonder of wonders–small dogs organized by size, weight, breed, etc. Click on an individual cell and you can change its source. Pretty slick. Still a work in progress, though. It should be available later this month, Mayer says during the Q&A.

Another new feature: Rich Snippets. A search for “drooling dog BBQ” returns your standard Google results along with a list of metadata–average user reviews, for example. A search for a GPS system includes an additional pointer to a recent CNET review of the unit in question. Rich Snippets is open API, incidentally.

Last up, an Android star map app that uses GPS to create a star map “local to your place on earth” and to your position. Move the phone and the map adjusts to your view–essentially the app transforms the device into map overlay for the sky. And how does this tie into search? Search for “Gemini” and a sort of pointer appears onscreen directing you to its location in the sky. And with that, Mayer wraps things up.

What is interesting here, though, are 100 percent unconfirmed hints that the next-generation iPhone will support faster 3G speeds. If this is indeed the case, it suggests that the device may run Infineon’s new SGOLD3 chipset. And if it does, that means it will be capable of supporting not just download speeds twice that of current 3G networks–theoretically 7.2 Mbps–but a five-megapixel camera and real-time video encoding/decoding with a new on-board video camera. Now that would make for an exciting summer, indeed.

Pathetic. In Japan the median download speed is 63.60Mbps. In South Korea it’s 49 mbps. For crying out loud, in Finland it’s 21.7Mbps.

How is it that the median download speed of the country that invented the Internet is this abysmal? No wonder it’s fallen to 15th place among industrialized nations in the percent of the population subscribing to broadband. No wonder broadband adoption slipped to a seven-year low in the second quarter of 2008.