Microsoft and Twitter Became Partners!

Microsoft executives made the announcement at the Web 2.0 Summit held in San Francisco, saying that a partnership with social networking website Facebook will come at a later date.

Microsoft didn't disclose the financial terms of the Twitter deal, which the software giant said is non-exclusive.

With the deal, Microsoft now has access to the "entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search," Paul Yiu of the Bing social search team said in a posting on the search engine's blog.

The idea of accessing data in real time has been an elusive goal in the world of search, and the popularity of Twitter provides the best opportunity to address the challenge, Yiu noted.

"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," Yiu wrote.

"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," Yiu said.

Biz Stone , co-founder of Twitter, argued that opening the deluge of public, real-time data to Microsoft can help users find "those that make the most sense right now."

While Twitter currently presents tweets based simply on timeliness, Bing is experimenting with new solutions such as "best match," he said in a blog posting.

"We hope more working relationships with organizations in the search business will mean even more variety for users," said Stone.

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