There’s been plenty of discussion about how Google, Microsoft, and other players in search are going to address “the Twitter problem” – the service’s ability to unearth breaking news and links far quicker than traditional search engines.
In fact, just last week, Google launched a new search option that allows users to filter search results to show only links that are new within the last hour.
However, competition might not even be necessary. According to The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital, Twitter is talking to both Google and Microsoft about licensing deals that would allow them to integrate Twitter data into their search engines.

From the report:

“According to sources familiar with the situation–Twitter is in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google separately about striking data-mining deals, in which the companies would license a full feed from the microblogging service that could then be integrated into the results of their competing search engines.”

Continuing, All Things Digital says that such deals would be worth “several million dollars” to Twitter and potentially include ongoing revenue sharing.
There are of course plenty of search engines that already utilize Twitter data, and Bing actually already launched one. Twitter could conceivably provide added value in the form of a truly full feed that includes all tweets (currently, Twitter search only goes several days back).
It’s certainly an interesting new twist on the evolving Twitter business model story, that points towards the company’s desire to remain independent and become financially viable, as opposed to get acquired by someone like Google or Microsoft. Now, we’ll have to wait and see if this actually happens, or gets filed away with the seemingly dozens of other Twitter business rumors we’ve seen pop up in recent months.

We’ve known this was coming for a while (some of you shared your GeoCities memories back in April), but Yahoo today sent out a final closure notice with the date of GeoCities’ demise: October 26.
Back in the proverbial day, GeoCities was the place where many a modern-day internet nerd cut his or her teeth. After a spectacular dot com purchase of $3.65 billion and an equally spectacular dot com bust, its closure marks the end of one of the earliest ages of the social web.

Yahoo, of course, has been busy slimming down and cutting costs under CEO Carol Bartz. With the company’s focus elsewhere, it makes sense to shut down what is essentially an internet relic. Still, to those who look back with nostalgia, October 26 could well be a wistful day. Check out the full farewell letter below, and let us know if you have any memories from the heady GeoCities days to share in the comments!

Back in 2005 (a long time in the social media world), Yahoo acquired Delicious, the popular social bookmarking website. Both Yahoo and Delicious founder Joshua Schachter had big plans to change the way we share, remember, and discover information on the Internet. Yahoo even promised “to give Delicious the resources, support, and room it needs to continue growing the service and community.”

So where is it now? Unfortunately, in the case of Delicious, nowhere. It’s been stagnant in terms of development and growth for years (at least until recently, when it started launching new features). Delicious has hit a perpetual ceiling, and understandably its founder is not happy about it. So he spoke out.

He made his comments during a conversation on Hacker News. Joshua responded to a comment claiming Yahoo was cool with “Since when is Yahoo cool?” Then he described Yahoo as a “sausage factory” before making the following statement:

I guess. I think the folks that pay Linus or whatever have done more for OS. Sun’s opensolaris, too. MySQL, etc too. Just by sheer weight of code.

The problem is that the number of cool projects is pretty minimal. They’re in duck and cover mode. They’ll get pushed to trim employees further and further to stretch the revenues out.

I wish I had not sold it to them. The cash and freedom do not even come close; I would rather work on a big, popular product.

We cannot blame Joshua for his frustration. Delicious’s growth has stagnated for at least a year and has completely dropped in terms of relevance. Even a few years ago, it had huge prospects and strong potential. Joshua (who is now at Google) put his heart and his soul into the popular bookmarking service. What he got in return wasn’t the same commitment.

Does Yahoo have a chance to turn Delicious around? Yes. But Delicious could have been a lot more relevant and useful right now, and Joshua knows it. Knowing that has to be heartbreaking.

It’s no coincidence that Facebook launched a new real-time search engine on the same day that it bought FriendFeed and Google announced a new infrastructure project aimed at speeding up its indexing time. Make no mistake about it: people that know search believe that there’s gold in real-time and social data, and Facebook’s blockbuster acquisition of FriendFeed was a lob squarely across Google’s bow.

Facebook has always been in a position to take a lead in real-time and social search because of the sheer amount of data the site has collected about what people are doing, the things they’re interested in, and what their social graph looks like. About 15 months ago, Paul Buchheit, the founder of FriendFeed, actually wrote that the human link data at sites like Facebook “could ultimately be more valuable than the link data from the web” that Google’s search engine is based on – someone just needs to mine it. Now he may have his chance.

What Facebook Has

Here’s the bullet point list of what Facebook got by purchasing FriendFeed:

• A collection of very smart, ex-Google engineers that really know real-time search
• A social status platform that is arguably better than TwitterTwitterTwitter’s
• A powerful, ready-made real-time search product
• A small, but influential user base full of early adopters willing to try and evangelize new products

Some might think FriendFeed was a second choice acquisition for Facebook, since the company couldn’t land Twitter last year. But FriendFeed was probably the smarter choice. At just under $50 million it cost less than 1/10th as much as Twitter would have, and comes with arguably a better platform and a team that’s just as strong. Yes, Twitter has more than 20 times as many users, but the acquisition of FriendFeed was clearly about technology and engineering talent – one thing Facebook is not lacking, after all, is users.

Google Worry

Facebook has one major asset: users, lots of them. 250 million registered users, to be exact, 30 million of whom update their status at least once per day. What they don’t have is users who are used to sharing their status updates with the world, but they’re trying to change that.

Google still gets more than twice as many visitors as Facebook, but how might that change if Facebook and the new engineering additions from team FriendFeed figure out how to slice and dice that user data in real-time? No one has yet really cracked the real-time or social search egg, but if Facebook can do it, its approximately hundreds of millions of monthly visitors could become hundreds of millions of monthly searchers – and that’s very monetizable and very dangerous to Google’s core business.

And what of Microsoft? Let’s not forget that Microsoft’s BingBingBing powers web search results on Facebook, already. What if the two companies mash it all together and Facebook’s real-time, social web search results find their way out onto Yahoo! (which will soon serve Bing search results)? That’s a very plausible eventuality, and another that’s very dangerous to Google.

What should really worry Google, though, is Facebook’s track record. Facebook has a knack for taking the technologies geeks love and adapting them for mainstream audiences. They did it with the news feed (FriendFeed), photo tagging (Flickr), link sharing (Delicious), and even status updates, which Facebook had before Twitter, but only pushed to the forefront once Twitter got hot with early adopters.

Sometimes a vocal minority fights against these features when they are first introduced, but Facebook has proven that it has a knack for knowing when to tweak and change features and when to stand their ground to find that sweet spot for features that users eventually come to love and rely upon.

Given their past track record, it seems likely that Facebook will be able to get most of its tens of millions of active users to embrace whichever of FriendFeed’s features it co-opts and if they can then succeed in convincing those users to use its combination real-time/Bing-powered web search – look out Google, you have a new and very worthy competitor.