Microsoft is expected to announce two separate deals today – one with Twitter and one with Facebook. From the sound of it, the deals would be similar in nature, both giving Bing access to index status updates from both social networks.
Kara Swisher at Boomtown says that both deals are confirmed and are expected to be announced this afternoon at the Web 2.0 summit. The deals are non-exclusive, however. And you know what that means.
Google has been reported to have been talking with both Twitter and Facebook too, and it would be no surprise to see deals made there as well.
But this is Microsoft’s moment. But what will it mean as far as status updates from both Twitter and Facebook?
"Much of what is posted on Twitter is public by design, while Facebook’s users prefer the closed nature of the service to disperse a wide variety of personal information only to their friends and they want to control it," says Swisher. "Thus, sources said, not all Facebook updates will be included in the real-time feed to be searched by Bing, but only those its users choose to make available to the wider public. Facebook will apparently provide users with a numbers of new tools to do so."
According to Swisher, neither of Microsoft’s deals will bear fruit for several weeks, and that would leave plenty of time for Google to sneak in with its own deals. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
As for the financial details of Microsoft’s deals with Twitter and Facebook, these can only be speculated upon at this point.
