Your Status Will Now Be Binged: Microsoft to Tie Up With Facebook and Twitter to Index Status Updates

350 million users and billions of real time updates, that’s what Microsoft is looking to tap into through deals with Facebook and Twitter. According to All Things Digital, Microsoft will announce separate nonexclusive deals today with both Facebook and Twitter to integrate their real-time feed of status updates into the Bing search service. ATD fittingly called this a one-two punch.

Who took this Punch?

Google of course. While Big G has been in talks with both the social media powerhouses for a similar deal, Microsoft has cleverly leveraged on pre-existing relationships to get it first. Microsoft as almost everyone knows was an early investor in Facebook (probably a move just to keep Google off ..which is no doubt paying off now) and has also shared commercial relations with Twitter before (remember the first speculation of monetization – Exectweets).

Bing had earlier bean indexing Twitter to some extent in its search results. It was nowhere near the real time indexing rather was just a plain reference to high profile users and their latest tweets. With this news Microsoft has taken that initiative to its next level.

Facebook on the other hand, a partial Microsoft product had begun the integration process by first dramatically improving its search function (which also displayed web search results powered by Bing) thus laying the platform to export status updates as a data mine. This news has already created a lot of noise in the blogosphere with many users complaining how this is an invasion of privacy and how they don’t want their status messages on a third party search platform. Check Mashable’s comments section here.

However, there shouldn’t be a big concern on that front because the deals being signed are separate for Twitter and Facebook. While the former anyway is a purely public platform of statuses, the more private Facebook environment will provide users the ability to decide whether their status updates can be crawled.

While for both Facebook and Twitter this presents a boost to their revenue generating mechanism, it is more important for all parties involved on how these data will be indexed. It is the other side the one that’s not Twitter’s or Facebook’s that holds the vital numbers. How will the search engine use this data and these deals to their advantage?

One needs to admit that most of what goes around on Facebook and Twitter as updates are more noise than hard data. What they present for both Bing now and Google later is add sentiment into the picture perhaps. While that is a big step up it does not make or break the search experience for the user (considering every tool in their current state), for him (or her) it is real time information that will crack the deal. Here again, it is not that Google itself can’t get real time, over a period it will, therefore seeking Twitter’s hand should help it garner more value than just data by the second.

Does this value exist? And how exactly does Bing and Google plan to integrate these data with their existing algo and results would be interesting and highly debated upon in the days to come.

Again before we get excited, this can certainly turn out be one of those all American feature like most other introductory features. Then again, regardless of whether it stays within or moves out of the US it is one helluva step in the changing face of search. It also is another brick on the social wall that the web is building around and within itself, an interconnected web of websites that are fueled and driven by social networks and social media.