Microsoft Loops In Facebook, Twitter

SAN FRANCISCO -- Microsoft announced a major deal with Facebook and nobody batted an eye.

Microsoft's ( MSFT - news - people ) head of online services Qi Lu confirmed a rumored search deal with Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The partnership, which allows Microsoft’s Bing search engine to index public status updates from both Facebook and Twitter, is now live and baked into its search offering.

“We do not disclose any financials,” Lu said. ”I do not know the specific terms, but this is just the start.”

At the conference, the participation of Twitter--a much smaller network--took center stage. The fact was echoed by a Microsoft executive who came on stage to demonstrate how Bing employs its new Twitter data stream. “I really want to focus on Twitter,” he said. “That’s the big partnership.”

But is it? Facebook, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is one of the largest Web sites and perhaps one of the largest networks in human history. Some 300 million people actively use the tool, almost all of whom publish under their real names. Facebook says people spend 8 billion minutes a day on the site worldwide.

Twitter, in contrast, has well under 100 million active users. There, users post under username handles, not necessarily their real names. Moreover, the majority of that information is already indexed by search engines like Google ( GOOG - news - people ) and OneRiot thanks to an unthrottled public programming interface.

To the technology elite that attend the Web 2.0 conference, Twitter is a social darling and at the front of the collective mind. That may not be true among the rest of the world, who will now likely be able to see their real-time public opinions searchable on Bing.com.