Microsoft is reportedly in talks with the social networking site Twitter to allow Microsoft"s Bing search service have access to Twitter"s data. AllThingsD.com reports via unnamed sources that the while two companies are chatting about renewing the deal, it adds that Microsoft and Twitter still have a number of issues under dispute, "including the price and term of the data licensing, the way the tweets and advertising linked to it will be presented on Bing, the cut of that advertising and even how much traffic Bing pushes back to Twitter." Microsoft would also like to get more control over the user interface and perhaps even a longer agreement than what has been offered by Twitter.
Earlier this month Google shut down its real time search feature due to Google not able to renew an agreement with Twitter. AllThingsD states that Twitter was surprised that Google didn"t renew the agreement and that it could result in Twitter losing tens of millions of dollars in revenue. However the article adds that the two parties are still in talks to perhaps renew the previous deal in some way.
But just how valuable is real time search to Microsoft? One unnamed source is quoted as saying that real time search features " ... could be valuable, especially with a really good implementation, in terms of user experience and also revenue. But it has definitely not crossed that threshold for anyone yet." Twitter still has some real time search agreements with other sites, including Yahoo.