Signs of Twitter's Business Model Emerge Via Bing, Google Deals

The partnership deals recently announced by Twitter with Bing and Google contain some hints of what kind of monetization strategy the micro-blogging, social media service is choosing to pursue, at least in the near term.

"A fast growing amount of information is coursing through Twitter very quickly, and we want there to be many ways to access that information," co-founder Evan Williams posted to the company blog. "As part of that effort, we've partnered with Google to index the entire world of public tweets as fast as possible and present them to their users in an organized and relevant fashion."

Regarding the Bing deal, co-founder Biz Stone, added, "Twitter is providing Bing access to the overwhelming deluge of public, real-time tweets rushing in from all around the world so they can help you find those that make the most sense right now. While Twitter currently presents tweets based simply on timeliness, Bing is experimenting with new solutions such as 'best match.'"

So, both Microsoft and Google will be indexing Tweets in a major way, henceforth, bringing a version of "real-time search" (sort of) to life in the process.

My assumption, absent any official announcement by the parties involved, is that the two search giants are forking over some major cash to Twitter for this privilege. Why not? They've both got the cash reserves to play, and integrating more real-time content into their search results represents a major upgrade from where they have been, pre-Twitter, in the unfolding age of social media.

From the cache of documents leaked to TechCrunch earlier this year by an anonymous hacker, we know that every big player in online media, including Google and Microsoft, has been knocking on Twitter's doors, seeking a deal. This is no surprise: Twitter is the hottest thing in digital media since the advent of the world wide web.

But over the past year as I've tried to envision how Twitter was going to make money off of its amazing emergence as what I call the "breaking news channel of choice," I've assumed, perhaps wrongly, that the company would be launching a much more effective real-time search engine than its legacy model. It makes sense -- Twitter has the data, Twitter can make the data accessible in a much more user-friendly manner than has heretofore been the case, and can integrate sponsored links, plus provide the metrics to evaluate the search and advertising data -- and presto! Twitter makes a ton of money.

But that's just me on the outside, peering in and imagining what it must be like to be Biz Stone or Ev Williams and the executive team running Twitter.

Yet, years of experience with companies at stages of development not unlike Twitter's has taught me that things rarely go as you hope, or project internally, so eventually you have to go outside your own shop to achieve scale.

So what I think is happening here is that Twitter is going to cash in on these partner deals while it continues to make the in-house investments to build its own proprietary real-time search engine (the best evidence indicates that progress on this latter work is continuing.)

Or -- maybe the partnerships will prove so lucrative that they will obviate the need to invest so much time and energy and money in building something that might take years, and -- in the process -- miss the moment entirely.

I could be totally off-base here, but I'm reading Twitter's embrace of both Microsoft and Google as a major reality check. If so, that is probably good news for all three companies. The little guy is not going to knock the big guys off the block any time soon.

But in the process, maybe the little guy is going to grow up and move into the same stratosphere they occupy. If so, (s)he'll partially be doing so with the big guys' money.

(Note to Twitter: Last night and today, the "Blog" link at the bottom of your landing page is misdirecting those who click on it to your "Status" page. Also your individual blog posts are not loadable; simply the Blog home page.)
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