Microsoft, Google Announce Partnerships With Twitter
As competition between the two firms continues, Microsoft and Google have both announced separate partnerships with microblogging Web site Twitter.
During a Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday, Microsoft announced that its young search engine, Bing, now features a real-time Twitter search service.
Less than two hours after Microsoft’s announcement, Google said it had made a similar partnership with Twitter and would unveil its own real-time Twitter search platform in “coming months.”
Microsoft’s Internet executive Qi Lu told reporters at the Web 2.0 Summit that Bing would serve as the best alternative to Twitter itself in helping users find out what people are tweeting about.
Google soon responded with its own announcement on its official blog.
“In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged “” real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic,” Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, wrote on the blog.
“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.”
On Tuesday, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams spoke optimistically about the Web site’s future growth.
"The number of interesting things we can do with Twitter is just endless," Williams told John Bettelle in an interview at the summit. "It just blows my mind."
“Our US Twitter.com growth has slowed temporarily and there are some things we will be launching that we think will pick that back up," he said.
Williams also mentioned that the company intends to get rid of its “suggested user” list to allow Twitter members to discover other users to follow on their own.
Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online services group, said a Facebook status update search feature would also be made available in the future.
"We are giving Bing a feed of data made open to everyone," said Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.
"No money exchanged hands. We are not trying to make money on data."
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