Bing Deal: Microsoft Partners With Twitter, Facebook To Post Content

Microsoft has beat out search engine giant Google for a nonexclusive deal with social networking sites Twitter and Facebook, in a new beta service that integrates posts from the social networking giants into its search service Bing.

The announcement was made by Qi Lu, president of Microsoft's online services division, during a Web 2.0 conference presentation in San Francisco, and was presented along with a brief demo of the new service conducted by Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president for Microsoft's online audience business group.

The Twitter deal gives its Bing service a leg up over its biggest competitor, search engine giant Google, which has yet to integrate tweets and other social networking content into its search service. While Twitter allegedly is working on a similar deal with Google, the details are not yet disclosed.

Microsoft has reportedly been in negotiations with Twitter for several weeks regarding its content, and has already incorporated Twitter posts, known as tweets, into Bing search results. During the demo, Mehdi showed how Bing calls up tweets on its search page following popular search term requests.

Microsoft has not revealed exactly how Facebook posts and updates will be incorporated into Bing, although it's not likelyall Facebook updates will be included. Instead, the new service will only include Facebook posts that users have chosen to make available to the public, The New York Times reported.

Twitter's content inherently is public while most of Facebook's more than 300 million users post to a closed network of familiar contacts. Subsequently, how Microsoft chooses to display Facebook posts could be vastly different from the way it currently incorporates tweets.

Meanwhile, the Bing deal also unleashes the largest amount of real-time and social-content media onto the search world. While the details of the Microsoft partnerships also have yet to be revealed, negotiations reportedly included a payment by Microsoft to Twitter, according to The Times, and could likely result in similar payment to Facebook.

Microsoft executives said that the beta service would not be accessible to users for another several weeks.

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