eMediaOne

Well there is no denying that today was an interesting one when it comes to the world of search and the real time web. From everything I have read so far today everyone seems to be of the opinion that the two deals Twitter made today are pretty important and I would have to agree with that assessment.

Microsoft

Other than Twitter I would have to say that the big winner of today’s announcements definitely has to be Microsoft. Not only did they ink a deal with Twitter but they also made one with Facebook as well. While Microsoft’s Bing search already has a beta page up for searching Twitter it will be a couple of months apparently before their work with Facebook will be available.

The fact that Microsoft was able to have even a beta result page ready for the announcement today could prove to be very important for the company. As it stands Google won’t have anything available for anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of months – depending on who you talk to.

This is a golden window for Microsoft and Bing because it will give them time to review and fine tune how the results are made available during which they can try and capitalize on being the only major search provider searching the real time web. While they won’t see a rush of new users to the search service it could definitely cause more than a few to start using Bing on a more regular basis.

Google

While the web’s search darling has announced inking a deal with Twitter for access to the fire hose the fact is that they are still some time from having anything people can actually use. I find it interesting that Microsoft was able to get a beta Twitter search up for today’s announcement but Google wasn’t. This would mean that Microsoft has to have had access to that hose prior to Google which goes to suggest that Microsoft has a better grasp on the importance of Twitter and real time search.

This isn’t to suggest that Google won’t have a good product when they do bring it to the table. On the contrary I fully expect them to have an interesting take on how real time search results should be handled. I just would have expected given the current opinion of Microsoft being a stick in the mud enterprise oriented company and Google being the do no evil Web 2.0 darling perpetual beta company that they would have been first in this little skirmish.

The fact that Microsoft beat them at this point with a usable real time search product doesn’t mean that the tables have turned. Google isn’t going to lose any sleep or long time users over the deal but Microsoft may have just been given a golden opportunity to show they have a very capable product that will win some folks over.

Twitter

You have to admit this was a pretty cool deal that Twitter managed to pull off without anything really leaking out about it. Being able to ink 2 non-exclusivity deals with serious enemies who are always looking to one up each other and nothing gets out almost right up until the announcements – nicely done.

While I am sure that Twitter will be banking some serious cash out of these deals I am sure it is nothing that would pale by comparison to an exclusive deal. This has me wondering if it was Twitter that made the non-exclusivity a requirement of even talking about making any deals. If so kudos to the Twitter team for making some good money but at the same time making sure the Twitter stream remained neutral.

Overall

We are the winners here – make no mistake. Microsoft gets a chance to prove to new users that they have a better search, Google gets to index even more of the world’s info only in real time, and Twitter gets to probably put some serious cash in the bank and possibly start living up to its valuation. In the end though it us the users who will ultimately benefit.

Twitter FTW.

Related posts:

1. Google Announces Twitter Search Deal
2. BREAKING: Microsoft’s Bing and Twitter search results live [Screenshots]
3. Yet another Twitter search company to go public June 18

MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta is here at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. He sat down with Federated Media’s John Battelle to answer some questions about his company.

Van Natta clearly had a strategy for this Q&A: To say “the socialization of content” as much as possible. That’s the direction he wants to lead the social network in as it attempts to prove it can exist in a world where Facebook has passed it as the dominant social network.

So what does the catchphrase mean? Van Natta thinks MySpace has a unique position on the web because of its music deals with all the major labels and the independent ones. And because it’s a much more open network than Facebook, he believes this will work to MySpace’s advantage in helping people find content.

And that’s why Van Natta had not one, but two announcements today surrounding MySpace Music. The first is a dashboard that artists can use to see analytics about who is visiting their page and listening to their music on the network. The second is a single hub for all music video content. (We covered both more in-depth here) Again, this is possible because of MySpace’s unique music deals with the labels, Van Natta stressed.

Van Natta wouldn’t comment on the talk that Google is unhappy with the major ad deal the signed in 2006 and is set to expire next year. He did say that MySpace has always been great at monetizing its site and losing any one deal would not be a major blow.

Earlier today, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s keyword was “sharing.” That’s essentially what Van Natta is saying too, but he’s betting that his more open network and strong media ties will differentiate it.

Find the full Q&A below (paraphrased):

JB: So, did you do a deal with Twitter (laughs)? What are you doing with MySpace?

OV: What we’re doing with MySpace is what me and Rupert first talked about it. We think it can be the next generation of digital distribution of content on the web. It’s happening through people and not through portals. It’s the “socialization of content.”

JB: To the crowd: How many people have a MySpace page (maybe 20%), how many have a Facebook Page? (everyone). So how is MySpace different, why use it?

OV: We think we’re different from Facebook because you don’t have to have a real connection to use it. Maybe you use it to discover music. Music tastes get influenced by your friends. Also movies. These are touchstones in relationships. You shouldn’t have to know them in the socialization of content.

JB: MySpace Music is a very big deal. How is music playing into this strategy? Does that box competition out?

OV: Music is a great example of our socialization of content. Everyone loves music across all demographics. Our music label relationships are unique and that gives us content that other networks don’t have. MySpace is the only place you can go today to stream all the music you want. And every band out there today has a presence on MySpace.

And today we’re launching an Artist Dashboard (more on that here). This is our first example of our integration with iLike, the deal we recently closed. You can see all kinds of data. Geographic breakdowns, etc. There was a huge demand for things like this from artists. And they can use this data beyond the web – like when they think about tour dates. This will be available to all artists.

And we can extend this across other entertainment models.

JB: Will you charge for it?

OV: I think we’ll find other ways to monetize. One more product announcement is that we’re launching the full catalog of music videos from all the labels (big and independant) in one place for the first time. This is a byproduct of our relatioships with the labels.

We know that we can make the site a lot easier to use, and we’re working on that. This is one thing. This is a cleaner design than a lot of areas of the site. This will launch as I step off the stage. This will surface videos in a social way.

JB: Didn’t Google just announce that?

OV: But ours is pretty. (laughs)

JB: But seriously what do you have to say about what Google just announced?

OV: No deal news, but we have a lot of cool partner announcements. Google has been a great partner for a long time. Stay tuned.

JB: Let’s talk about Google more. They have a huge deal with MySpace, that expires next year. It’s big to have that money, but it may not have worked out that well for Google. Does your business hurt if that goes away?

OV: We’re really pleased with where are business is and where it’s going. We’ve always been good at monetizing our business. This is integrated marketing that no one else on the web does. And we’ve just scratched the surface. A key going forward is how you measure success. Our business doesn’t hinge on any one deal. News Corp believes that too.

JB: Jon Miller is your boss, and they’re building a business of their own: FIM, and MySpace is a part of it.

OV: Jon will talk more about it, but FIM is a big part of our monetization today.

JB: If Google goes away can that replace it?

OV: Again, we’re really good at monetization. There’s a lot of opportunity.

JB: Owen was an early member of Facebook. What does success eventually look like for MySpace now?

OV: We think we have all the building blocks, we just need to execute. If we do that we will realize the vision of content being socialized.

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Following Google’s announcement of its music product this morning, Facebook is officially enhancing its Gift Shop with a redesign and new categories of gifts and additional gifts for charity, music and sports from developers. The changes will be rolled out to users in the coming weeks

On Facebook’s Gift Shop, you need to purchase credits on the site (via credit card), that cost 10 cents in U.S. currency are are available in 15 different countries. With the enhanced version of the gift shop, you will be able to purchase songs as gifts for your friends. Powered by Lala.com, the gift shop will offer over 8 million songs from a vast variety of artists ranging from Mozart to Beyonce. Web songs cost 1 credit (or 10 cents) each, while full, downloadable, and digital rights management-free (DRM) MP3s are 9 credits each. Some of this money goes to Facebook but Lala takes a cut of every transaction. But you don’t have to have a Lala account to play or receive a song.

So how do Facebook users play their songs form the social network? You can play songs from your news feed or from Lala.com’s platform, which they can connect to via Facebook Connect. If you buy an MP3, you can also download the songs you can play the tracks on iTunes or other music players. Facebook users who can see the music gift on other friend’s feeds can play the song in full once, after which they will be able to play a 30-second clip.

Facebook is also getting a little more sports-friendly by adding branded virtual gifts from professional and college teams. Officially licensed gifts from the U.S. National Basketball Association and U.S. Major League Soccer are now available in the Gift Shop, as well as school-themed gifts from a number of major U.S. colleges ranging from Oklahoma State to Stanford University.

While you can currently purchase gifts from non-profits, like Kiva, Project Red, TOMS Shoes, Charity Water and the World Wildlife Fund, Facebook is now also including gifts via the Causes application. So you can make donations to a cause as a gift for your friends for pretty much any cause supported through the app.

The concept of Facebook as an e-commerce platform seems to be lifting off. PayPal is partnering with Payvment to help any Facebook user set up a retail storefront. Not to mention the immense popularity of virtual gifts on the platform. And with this new announcement, it seems that not only if Facebook opening up a revenue stream, but the network is creating a totally new way for users to socially engage with the platform: through music.

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My mother always yells at me when she looks at my pictures on Flickr, saying that I don’t take enough pictures of people. The truth is, I do, I just put most of those on Facebook because it’s a billion times better for pictures of your friends because you can easily tag them. Now Flickr is gaining the same functionality — but better.

Its new “People In Photos” feature is long overdue. With it, you’ll be able to select a picture and start typing a person’s name, which will then scan your Flickr contacts to see who it should add as a tag to the picture. And like Facebook, you’ll be able to draw an outline around someone’s face to show exactly who they are in the picture.

But the reason this feature is even better than Facebook’s functionality is the opt-out and opt-in options. While most users love the people tagging for photos in Facebook, just about everyone wishes there were more options that allow you to opt-out of being tagged in certain photos. You can untag yourself, or block people from tagging you, but there isn’t a good case-by-case method of doing this.

Flickr is offering that by allowing you to opt-out of being tagged in individual photos. And once you opt-out, unlike Facebook, no one can put you back into that photo. You can also set who is able to tag you in photos. And you can set who is able to tag people in photos that you shared.

The stength Facebook has over Flickr is that you probably have many more contacts, or at the very least, actual friends on Facebook. Because Flickr relies on your Flickr contact list, it probably won’t be as useful as Facebook’s, at least at first. But this is a great incentive to get you adding more contacts on Flickr, and encouraging your friends to sign up.

Users have long been working around Flickr’s lag of people photo tagging by doing it manually in the tag section of pictures. Now it’s getting a whole lot better. Undoubtedly, some users will hate this feature, but they can opt-out entirely from being tagged.

When you’re tagged in a photo, it will show up in your recent activity stream. And Flickr has revamped users’ profiles to show pictures you’re tagged in.

[photo: flickr/spuz]

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Today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO sat down to talk with Federated Media’s John Battelle.

Sandberg’s key point through all the questions was clear: Facebook is all about sharing. But it’s different from a competitor like Twitter because you can use Facebook to easily share with one person, just your high school friends, or the world.

Sandberg also noted that Facebook sees a shift going on from an information economy to a social economy. This can be thought of a move from everyone just using Google to get information, to using social services like Facebook and Twitter.

She spoke at length about the importance of Facebook’s development community, both the Platform and Facebook Connect. She expanded on some data Facebook VP of Engineering, Mike Schroepfer, gave earlier, noting that Facebook now has over a million developers working on its platform. And 250 applications now have a least a million users each.

Sandberg alsp spoke a bit more about the new Bing deal, which Microsoft only mentioned briefly while announcing the Twitter deal. She made it clear that the data Facebook will share with Bing is only the data that users opt to make public.

She also noted that no money changed hand in the deal. “We’re not trying to make money on data,” she said. While Microsoft would not comment on the deal with Twitter, Microsoft’s Qi Lu did imply it was a deal that involved money changing hands.

Here’s a chart from Mary Meeker’s talk yesterday at Web 2.0 Summit that shows how time spent on sutes like Facebook is going up.

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

JB: So earlier we saw the Bing announcement, but we

SS: We’re announcing today that we’re working with Microsoft to give them a feed of our updates that are open to the public. In the Bing search results you’ll see all data that users make public.

JB: So when will that be in Google?

SS: Oh you almost got me. Nothing to announce at this time.

JB: So Facebook is profitable now. That’s something you must be proud of. How did you do it?

SS: Yeah we knew that was going to happen. We think the numbers are finally showing the promise of advertising on the web. It’s no longer a one-way communication that you blast to people. Facebook is where you are your authentic self of the web, and marketers love that. We’re not only profitable but cash flow positive as well.

JB: What’s the date of the IPO?

SS: Oh, we’re announcing that later (laughs). Nothing to announce now.

JB: How important have online ads been to scale the business?

SS: Really important, we’re international now with it. We sell directly and we have a platform, both are really important for it.

JB: It seems like the referral system is shifting. It’s not just about Google searches anymore, it’s Facebook and Twitter now. Did you notice that when you were still at Google? Is that why you shifted to Facebook? Should Google be worried?

SS: What we see at Facebook is that there’s a shift going on from information economy to the social web. Google will continue to be important, the search for sites, but we believe in the wisdom of friends. That’s how I learned not to take my kids to see Where The Wild Things Are.

JB: What about Aardvark which using IM and other things to answer questions? How do you manage the tension between the things you do in house between what the development community creates? Like Aardvark.

SS: The developer community is very important to us. We don’t try to build everything our users want to use. We do the core technology. We have over a million developers. 250 applications now have at least a million users each. We don’t care how people share using Facebook, it just matters that we’re the technology to connect.

JB: What is Facebook’s unique proposition versus Google or Microsoft in competing for the social graph?

SS: No cake is ever baked on the Internet – we have to be vigilant. Facebook is about where you are on the web. You put up your most personal information. We’re the only place that you can share with one person, just your high school friends, or the world. And we can scale, as Mike talked about earlier.

JB: Let’s talk about Facebook Connect. Give a quick overview. Is it now better than it was when it launched?

SS: It’s an extension of our platform. So if you’re on a third party site, you can log in there with your FB credentials, and share back information to Facebook. I used to have meetings with people who want communities on their sites, but every site can do that. We make it easy to add your friends which you already have on Facebook.

JB: How much more will you be able to do? Not everyone is my Facebook friend. Will the core Facebook funcitonality come outside of Facebook too?

SS: Our goal is to help you share the most you can both on Facebook and off.

JB: Facebook Connect looks like a potential Trojan Horse for a monetization service, like an AdSense like product. Is that in the plan?

SS: Not now. We’re asked that all the time, and it’s a good question, but we’re not focused on that right now. Right now we want Connect to be easier to use, an work with partners for deep integrations.

JB: Are developers asking for monetization through Connect? How do you keep developers happy?

SS: There are different types of developers and sites that use us. Some are big like Huffington Post or ABC News. ABC News used Facebook Connect when Michael Jackson died – users talked through Connect. It’s good for us and them. But it’s not about monetization, it’s more about making it easier to interact. On the Platform side, Mark Pincus/Zygna is a great exmple.

JB: Glad you brought up Zynga, they make their money through PayPal. Will you do your own payment system?

SS: There’s a lot of speculation about that, but I won’t speak to that. But we do have payments already on the site for buying ads, for example. We’re also allowing people to buy virtual goods with Facebook Credits. We’re doing testing with a few developers to take payments in their apps. That’s all I’ll say.

JB: When Ev Williams of Twitter was here, I asked if he was flattered that FB is more like Twitter now. Was that planned?

SS: Change is in the DNA of Facebook. That existed long before Twitter. We think Twitter is impressive – they’ve built something important. The world is shifting towards realtime sharing. When we launched status updates, no one got it. Now people are realizing Twitter is important. That’s a global movement. Like Evan said, there’s room for more than one player in that.

JB: The scale is really different too, right?

SS: We do 45 million status updates a day, from 30 million individuals. That’s a lot.

JB: Has the vision behind Facbeook shifted?

SS: I don’t think it has. It’s always been about helping people connect. Certainly we build new things that change the service. We’re evolving.

JB: So you were in the Treasury during the Clinton administration. How do you think the Valley is doing at having a conversation with D.C.?

SS: Silicon Valley is an amazing force for our country. We’re changing the world. I think our impact on policy is not as profound. Other industries are better at that. Globalization, immigration policies for us to hire, we as an industry have more to do for those things. They’re important for all of us – free capital and labor. We can do better.

Audience Q&A Session

Q: Aren’t you moving more in the direction of strangers with your changes?

SS: Privacy has always been at the center of what we do. Facebook allows you to differentiate who you want to share with. A lot of people, or just a few. And now you can share with the public. It’s all about user choices. They need to be more granular. Should this status update be for everyone, or just for my friends? We’re still working on it.

JB: Yahoo, AOL, and MySpace are all moving towards content. Facebook isn’t doing that now. Will that change?

SS: No, that’s not going to change. We’re about sharing, our content comes from users. We’re an important referer of content. We will not hire an editorial staff and do our own.

Q: Any advice for marketers who want to use Facebook?

SS: Do it quick and iterate. Facebook is much more iterative, it’s two way marketing. Make a Page and update it.

Q: Can you imagine a future where Google and Facebook work together?

SS: I can imagine a lot of things, but still nothing to announce. More broadly, are we working with lots of partners for sharing information? Yes. We have an open platform, we want to work with a lot of people.

JB: That was not a “no.” (laughs)

Q: Does Google have to have an agreement to access your APIs? What’s with the Bing deal?

SS: The Bing agreement is giving them a feed of our “everyone” data. No money exchanged hands. We’re not trying to make money on data.

Q: What about older people now using Facebook?

SS: We want everyone to use Facebook. It started in college, but we’ve grown quickly. The fastest growing group is over 35 now in the U.S. The great thing is that Facebook is personal for everyone.

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Today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s VP of Engineering talked a bit about the infrastructure of the company.

Basically, Schroepfer’s key point is that Facebook is not afraid to be bold and take risks to get done what it needs to from an engineering perspective. They’ve come up with a number of their own solutions to solve a massive scaling problem, and sometimes we (the users) see bugs as a result of that. But, in a world where the much smaller Twitter goes down regularly, Facebook’s relative stability is pretty impressive.

How impressive? Schroepfer threw out some huge numbers. Among them:

• Users spend 8 billion minutes online everyday using Facebook
• There are some 2 billion pieces of content shared every week on the service
• Users upload 2 billion photos each month
• There are over 20 billion photos now on Facebook
• During peak times, Facebook serves 1.2 million photos a second
• Yesterday alone, Facebook served 5 billion API calls
• There are 1.2 million users for every engineer at Facebook

Below find the earlier live notes (paraphrased)

• What do people do on Facebook everyday?
• 8 billion minutes online everyday, using Facebook.
• 2 billion pieces of content shared every week
• Over 2 billion photos uploaded each month
• Over 20 billion photos now on Facebook.com
• Serving over 1.2 million photos a second on a peak day.
• Yesterday we served 5 billion API calls
• Facebook connect is growing even faster than Facebook
• In over a year we went from 100 million daily actives to 300 million daily actives
• When Zuckerberg started the site, it was only Harvard, then more schools were added, but they were silos. Then we connected those schools, then in 2006 we opened it up.
• It’s way bigger than a single database, so you have to spread this data out.
• Rendering a homepage on Facebook, which do it a couple billion times a day, in a couple of seconds.
• We use something we built which we call “multifeed” which we use along with memcache to get data in milliseconds.
• 50 million operations a second via memcache
• We scaled memcache 5 X its original performance – we rewrote it
  
• Importance of our culture:
  
• Move Fast – sometimes we push bugs, but that’s innovation
• Huge impact – 1.2 million users for every engineer at Facebook
• Be Bold – change something if we need to.
  

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At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today Microsoft’s President of Microsoft’s Online Services Group, Qi Lu, spoke with Tim O’Reilly. He hit on some of his overall goals with Microsoft and search, but the real story was clear: The deal between Microsoft and Twitter to inject real-time tweets into Bing’s results. Yes, the deal is real and it’s a key part of what Microsoft is calling “Bing Wave 2.”

Another part of Bing Wave 2 is Facebook data, but that will come later, and it’s vague as to how that will work. Today was all about Twitter as Lu introduced another Microsoft employee who works under him to demo the new version of Bing (screenshots below).

The demo results were impressive. It’s like a better version of Twitter search because it has more options and Microsoft has access to Twitter’s entire (public) feed of tweets to work with. With Bing, when you do a Twitter search, you will see both the most recent tweets, as well as the top links that are being shared dealing with whatever query you made.

And the most recent tweets come into Bing in a constantly updating realtime feed (there’s a pause button for it too). There is also a retweet button to easily retweet and tweet you see in the results.

Lu would not disclose what the financial terms were for this deal, but he did imply there was one. He also noted that the deal is non-exclusive. That’s important as there are also rumors floating around that Google is working with Twitter on a similar deal.

Bing with Twitter is live now, you can find it here.

Below, find the full Q&A (paraphrased):

TO: Why go to Microsoft (from Yahoo)?

QL: I left Yahoo simply because I had been there a long time (10 years). I told Jerry that was a long time. I sat around awhile, then decided to go with Microsoft. I took it mainly because I had the opportunity to have a big impact. We launched Bing about 5 months ago and we’re seeing good traction.

TO: Are you gathering new forms of data to help users? Is the strategy to be better than anyone than giving users what they want from many different pipelines?

QL: Yes, that’s our long term goal. In the early days of search, queries were largely about navigational results. Engines are now good at finding web pages. But we need to get better at determining user intent. The web has a lot of stuff like Flickr images; images are very important in search results, not just as separate queries.

TO: With Bing you got good momentum, so what’s next?

QL: Ahead we have things like Facebook and Twitter. Particularly Twitter. It’s still in the early stages, but there is so much information out there.

TO: Any truth to those rumors about your deal with Twitter?

QL: To answer the question let’s do a demo.

(A Microsoft search employee comes on stage to give a demo of Bing)

This is what we call “Bing Wave 2.” One big thing is visual search which we showed off last month. Visual search helps a lot for things you that regular search queries may not help with, like shopping for a camera. And top iPhone apps.

But the real big part of Bing Wave 2 is about real-time information. Today we’re making two announcements. We’re going live with a beta shortly after this announcement. First is a strategic announcement with Twitter. We have access to all the Twitter information in real-time. Ev Williams and Dick Costolo have been great partnerss. The other partner will be Facebook – that’s coming at a later date.

But the big partnership is Twitter. You’ll remember in Bing Wave 1, we had some Twitter integration for some users, but this is much bigger. We have access to the full (public) data feed. You can see the full feed of tweets natively in Bing experience, and this updates in real-time.

But this isn’t just about the most recent tweets, we also have “best match” to search the tweets. We do de-duping, to get rid of repeats. Then we focus on the quality of the results, based on relevancy. One way to to see how many people follow a user. We also look for context, maybe they have a link in the tweet that is relevant. And if a tweet is being retweeted a lot, we loot at that.

We also filter out spam and adult items that shouldn’t be in results. We also have the “hottest topics on Twitter,” which is a tag cloud that you can click on to dive in. A real key is to look at the links. We look at what’s buzzy and show those to you.

And with Bit.ly URLs we will show you the domain of where you’re going to land, so you aren’t tricked.

Basically, that’s a quick peak. Remember, this is just in beta, but it should be live in a few minutes. In an hour it should be fully up and running. http://bing.com/twitter is how you find it.

Back to the Q&A

QL: We’re very excited about the Twitter deal, but remember that’s just one part of what we want to do.

TO: Financial terms.

QL: We’re not disclosing financial terms.

TO: I had to ask. What about length of the deal?

QL: I’m not sure, but this is a win-win and there will be other partnership.

TO: If your goal is to build a mind-reader, you’re going to have to learn a lot more about people. Privacy concerns?

QL: Great question. We need full disclosure and full transparency.

Audience Questions

AQ: Will this real time Twitter feed influence actual Bing results?

QL: Great question, again this is just the beginning. There’s a lot of signal from Twitter, but the signal is still evolving. We can use them to augment today’s search experience, but it’s very early for what we want to do with this. When you lower the barrier for consuming information, it’s great.

TO: Are you keeping the Twitter stream? Is Microsoft archiving these?

QL: I’m not going to answer that cause I’m not sure yet.

AQ: In your deal with Yahoo, can you talk about the data sharing? Is the Twitter deal non-exclusive?

QL: The Twitter deal is non exclusive. With Yahoo, we’re working together with them to make sure we protect both sets of users with this data.

TO: What’s the value of the data you’re getting from Yahoo?

QL: The scale of search from Yahoo is the key. What we want to do is data-driven, they have a larger footprint in search, so we can do more with more data.

That’s a wrap.

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Microsoft will announce the integration of real time status updates from both Twitter and Facebook into Bing at the Web 2.0 Summit today, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deals. The announcement will be made by Qi Lu, President of Microsoft’s Online Services Group, later this morning.

The deals will integrate real time updates from users of the services into search results. Google and Bing aren’t good at pulling in this real time data today because of the need to constantly index user pages, and the difficulty in knowing when those pages have been updated. Users have turned to Twitter Search and other real time search engines like Topsy and OneRiot to get this information.

Similar deals with Google have been rumored for some time, and we’ve confirmed that at least Twitter has been in discussions with Google around a data deal for months. But Bing is going to be first to announce these deals.

It will be weeks before the new features are live on Bing, we’ve heard from our source.

Facebook swamps Twitter in the number of status updates, with some 45 million of the short emotional grunts by users daily. However, Twitter updates are by default public. Facebook, in contrast, is default private and the vast majority of updates are currently protected from search engines.

Twitter has recently been criticized for exposing messages from users that have turned their accounts private – previously public messages remain indexable by search engines even after privacy settings have changed. Facebook is creating privacy controls, we’ve learned, that will allow users to set even previously public status updates to private, meaning search engines will be prohibited from indexing the content. It won’t be perfect, since anything published on the Internet is often spread far and wide. But it may allow users to hide previously public data to some extent.

There are two big questions that remain unanswered at this point. First, what will Google’s response to the Bing announcements be? And second, is Bing paying for this data? Twitter is clearly counting on data streams as a revenue source, but our position has been that the data is simply too valuable to give to competitors. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free and all that.

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Today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Morgan Stanley Managing Director, Mary Meeker, gave her usual quick presentation with a ton of information. Rather than trying to squeeze it all in (which not even she can in her 15 minute presentation), I will embed the slides below when they are up and hit on her major points.

Overall, she notes that Morgan Stanley sees many good signs that the economy is recovering. She notes that stock markets usually are a leading indicator of recovery, and certainly we’ve been seeing that recovery in the tech sector (see: Apple). That’s good news because the tech industry is now the most highest capitalized market, it’s no longer the financial industry.

Meeker thinks we’re in a new computing cycle with the mobile web. Meeker believes Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch are leading the way here, big time. She thinks the mobile web will be 10 times as big as the more traditional desktop Internet, and that it will grow much faster.

She also notes that the technologies around it are exploding: Wi-Fi, GPS, 3G, Bluetooth, etc. And all of this is exploding in a recession, she notes.

Other key points:

• Location-based services are the “secret sauce” of what makes the mobile web interesting.
• The iPhone/iPod touch is the fastest growing piece of hardware the world has ever seen.
• And usage share versus market share of the iPhone is incredible, meaning it will only grow.
• Facebook is becoming the multimedia repository, and it will allow you to do so much.
• Companies absolutely need to be on board with the mobile web. They have some time, but they need to act.

Find the full slides below:

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

This weekend, a number of people had things to say about the decay and seemingly inevitable death of FriendFeed. That included us, twice. While this was going on, the FriendFeed team remained largely silent, even on their own product. But today, co-founder Paul Buchheit has responded.

Naturally, in a FriendFeed posted item, here’s what he had to say:

There was a lot of chatter about the future of FriendFeed this weekend. The short answer is that the team is working on a couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world. Transformation is not the end. Consider this the chrysalis stage — if all goes well, a beautiful butterfly will emerge

But, this still seems to speak to very much what I was talking about this weekend. FriendFeed, as we knew it, is over. “FriendFeed goodness to the larger world,” would seem to imply either some more open-sourcing like they did with Tornado by way of Facebook. Or, a bigger movement of the FriendFeed technology over to Facebook itself.

Further open-sourcing FriendFeed and/or its APIs is great and all, but I fear things will get messy for end-users without a single product to focus on. Certainly, that will be useful for some people, and undoubtedly some services, but I have a hard time believing it will be able to fully replace the way I used FriendFeed, as a crowd-sourced pusher of information in real-time.

Facebook obviously has the size to provide that, but I still worry that it’s too big for the rapid pace of innovation we were seeing with FriendFeed to continue. I do hope the team is able to improve some of the areas that Facebook is lacking in, such as sharing speed, filters, and content discovery. But it won’t be the same.

And that’s fine, as Buchheit notes, “transformation is not the end.” But it’s hard to watch a service you relied heavily upon change drastically. Maybe the result will be a butterfly, but I didn’t consider FriendFeed to be a caterpillar before.

[photo: flickr/kiwinz]

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