It's tough to take on Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). The search engine behemoth owns 65% of the U.S. search market and has a commanding brand presence. Yet, the software maker up the coast isn't known to give up easily. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has cut a deal with microblogging site Twitter that should give it an edge in the battle to harness data and make it easier to find. A new deal will feed all those tweets into Bing, the Microsoft search engine.
Twitter is giving Microsoft full access to its data, in a deal announced Wednesday. Bing will provide search functionality for Twitter that you won't find in Google, which seems to have been outbid for the rights to the "tweet-stream." Under the deal, Bing will be able to index and display the tweets almost immediately as they are posted.
What else does this mean? Revenue! Real revenue for Twitter!
Founded in 2006, Twitter hasn't brought in any meaningful money, and it's come under a lot of fire for not having a discernable business model, despite having brought in a recent investment of $1 billion. The details aren't being revealed, but data sales is starting to seem like the right route for Twitter.
Twitter doesn't seem thrilled by the notion of running ads on the site, which it has said it won't consider doing until next year (despite a change in the terms of service). And, this is probably smarter than it looks. Despite the hefty user base and seemingly endless stream of tweets that are emitted every day, tools like TweetDeck, UberTwitter and even the basic cell phone can be used to access the social networking platform . . . with interactions that won't result in ad impressions. As a result, there may not be as much digital gold on Twitter as one would think.
The other option being discussed was the implementation of paid corporate accounts, which would provide analytics to premium users. But this has been on the lips of the Twitter-types for a while, and we haven't seen anything yet. Even if the product is released, Twitter will have to address its reliability. For now, it's pretty easy to tolerate the "fail whale" when the service is struggling under the weight of more users than it can handle. If you were paying an uncomfortable amount of money for premium access to the site, though, cute becomes annoying pretty quickly.
Selling data . . . that's a no brainer. With more than 45 million registered users, a subset of which are complete addicts, Twitter creates plenty of zeroes and ones that come together as information, and information is valuable to companies in the search business.
Twitter has something to sell -- it just needs to find more ways to do it.











Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-23-2009 @ 1:19AM
Beltway Greg said...
Big crowds at the Microsoft store in Arizona. Big crowds for the Ashley Tisdale tickets that they're giving away. Maybe they'll even do an Ashley Tisdale Zune.