Breaking: Twitter In Bed With Bing [2nd update]

In a new blog post, Twitter  has confirmed what we have known all day: Bing and Twitter can be found in the same bed. In their own words:

“Twitter is providing Bing access to the overwhelming deluge of public, real-time tweets rushing in from all around the world so they can help you 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.” We hope more working relationships with organizations in the search business will mean even more variety for users.”

Of course this can only be viewed as the conclusion of a bidding war of sorts between Google and Microsoft over access to Twitter nearly endless flow of data.

The link to the Bing blog is at the moment broken, so we still have no official word from Microsoft, more as it comes.

UPDATE

The Bing blog post is back up. Bing will be indexing all of the incoming tweets, the whole public feed, and providing them to Bing seachers. It will look something like this in the wild:

You can then select to see a page that just covers the tweets on the topic, and then sort them. Bing will also be sorting the top link on Twitter around a certain topic, which looks something like this:

Bing outlines a few internal examples of how this all works, and what it has done so far in internal testing:

• Sean Suchter (my boss) and I avoided a closed freeway on a rainy Seattle day and made our flight home.
• Eric Scheel (principle program manager on the team) a photo-gear junkie, keeps up on early product reviews and  owners’ tweets, which helped him decide on his next purchase.
• My wife thinks I am almost cool because I know stuff about Taylor Swift.

We will be bringing you a post as to what all of this means in the near future. For now, go over to Bing and give it a try!

Thanks to Flamarrion for the image.