Five Feet of Dynamite

Twitter made multiple headlines this week. Most significant of which, Bing and Google will now index Tweets in real time and display them along with search results. Bing has a public beta now available, but as far as I know Google hasn’t disclosed when they will begin to integrate. If you can’t wait for the official release, check out a new broswer plugin called Kikin. The plugin will allow you to integrate content from multiple social networking sites (like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even eBay and Amazon) with search results from your favorite search engine.

The Twitter announcement was made Wednesday at this year’s Web 2.0 Summit held in San Francisco. At the same conference, venture capitalist Sean Parker gave a presentation that has spurred a lot of conversation. Parker made the distinction between “network services” like major social networking sites, and “information services” like search engines. In his slide deck, Parker claims that network services will trump information services and ultimately shape the future of the internet. “Companies that harness the power of networks will dominate the internet. Collecting data is less valuable than connecting people.”

If Sean Parker is right, then the Bing and Google deal with Twitter is a good move. This week, the Pew Internet Project reported that Twitter and other microblogging services are used by 19% of internet users, which has increased from 11% of users 6 months ago. Also this week, Twitter hit a significant milestone on Monday with the 5 billionth Tweet, now known as the “Pentagigatweet”. (The Tweet has since been deleted by it’s author Robin Sloan, for whatever reason.)

The final word on this week’s Twitter news comes from co-founder and chief executive Evan Williams. The New York Times reported on Williams’ remarks from the Web 2.0 Summit, at which he announced that later this month Twitter will release its “Lists” feature, currently in beta for a few thousand users.  Lists allow Twitter users to better organize Twitter feeds that they are interested in, and I believe it’s going to be very similar to Amazon’s Listmania feature.

Facebook debuted a new feature of its own this week with a redesign of the Facebook user home page. Users can now toggle between “News Feeds” and “Live Feed”. The change was made without much explanation to Facebook users, thousands of which were left wonder what the heck was different between the News and Live feeds. Here’s I how explained the difference: The Live Feed are all the status and news updates that Facebook users are accustomed to seeing on their homepage; The News Feed is the feed of events from the Live Feed that the site believes will be most interesting to the user, based on how popular the post is, and based on the user’s past interactions on the site. This feature was developed in response to user feedback, but as with any major site change, there has been a minor backlash to the upgrade.

Mashable

Twitter: 5 Billion Tweets Served

Facebook Adds Digital Music to Gift Store

Tech Crunch

MySpace Adds Full Music Video Archives, Deep Artist Analytics

Sean Parker’s Rise of Facebook And Twitter, Fall Of Google Presentation (Full Slide Deck)

The ‘I Automatically Hate The New Facebook Home Page’ Group Gets Some Big Support

Kikin Personalizes Search By Tapping Into Your Social Graph

Ad Age

Google, Microsoft’s Bing to Include Twitter in Search

Controversial Amp App Gets Dumped By Pepsi

Brandweek

McAfee’s Documentary ‘Reverse Migrates’ to TV

Google Makes a ‘Banner Move’

Pepsi Pulls Amp iPhone App

19% of U.S. Internet Users Tweet

Wired

Amazon Dumps Sprint for Kindle 2, Embraces AT&T

Nation’s First Open Source Election Software Released

Blogs & Other News Sources

Amazon, Facebook, and Google back FCC on Net neutrality

Twitter’s Chief Talks About Lists, Traffic and Revenue

Facebook Revamps Homepage, News Feed

RT @google: Tweets and updates and search, oh my!

Twitter hits 5 billion tweets