Twitter Talking Separately to Microsoft and Google

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. Sources said a number of scenarios are being discussed to compensate Twitter for its huge and potentially valuable trove of real-time and content-sharing information, generated from the data stream of billions of tweets from its 54 million monthly users. These include a number of structures, including a payment of several million dollars to Twitter, along with various revenue-sharing proposals that would give Twitter a piece of the revenue made from search results. The deals, stressed sources close to the situation, are nonexclusive, especially because Twitter's management is keen to remain independent and also nonpartisan in the growing search battle between Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT). This means Yahoo (YHOO)–which recently struck a search-technology and online-advertising partnership with Microsoft–could also license Twitter's feed to make its search results even more robust, although Boomtown could not determine if the company is in talks with the San Francisco start-up. Sources said it is also possible that no agreement would be reached with either company. And execs at Twitter, Microsoft and Google had no comment when asked about talks. But doing these kinds of data deals with big search players does make a lot of sense, since it would be hard for Twitter to turbocharge its own search engine without running into the big cash-laden guns at both Google and Microsoft, which recently launched its new Bing search service. Twitter is, instead, seeking to create a large open platform, which many could plug into, from search engines to marketers to publishers to developers. Twitter has also been considering offering pr [...]

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