Twitter and Bing have renewed their search partnership, and announced it in a pretty interesting way: via a staged Twitter exchange.
If you can go to Bing and Twitter’s respective Twitter accounts, you can see the conversation between the two brands. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the deal was probably discussed a little bit more than this ahead of this Twitter exchange. Here’s how that exchange went:
@Twitter. ^bb
Hey@Bing What’s up?
@Twitter Been thinking about our last 2 yrs together. Instantly tapping into the wisdom of the Twitter community. Good times. ^bb
@bing Totally! Search w/o Twitter = old news. You & @MSN are amazing at using Tweets to make search better & help people stay in the know.
@Twitter Let’s say we stick together and do bigger and better things? ^bb
@bing We’re in. Can’t wait for what comes next.
Microsoft has confirmed that the deal is in fact being extended, but has been stingy with the details. In addition to that, Twitter has said that there is no news about a possible Google deal, but “Search w/o Twitter = old news” could only be taken as a dig against Google, which lost Twitter data in July.
It doesn’t exactly look good for a Twitter/Google reunion. Meanwhile Bing is getting quite cozy with the social networks (including Facebook as well).
Google is of course building its own social network in Google+, and the company has indicated that Google+ content would be featured in there. At this point, however, there Twitter-like flow of content just isn’t there – not enough to add real value in realtime search.