Since the huge rise in Twitter usage there has been a growing fascination with the so called ‘real-time web’. This has been particularly evident in recent weeks with news spreading of the major internet brands reportedly working on their search tools. Search Engine and Social Networking giants Google, Bing, Facebook and Twitter are all working on major changes to improve upon status updates and tweets to do a better job of indexing the web.

Of all the major online brands it seems as though Microsoft have won the race to get their update made first. Bing now displays recent Tweets from well-known people / celebrities. It seems that Microsoft were just rushing to win the race rather than implementing an exciting new tool to its search engine. The only way you can actually see these results is when you physically type in a celebrity name and ‘Twitter’ in the same search query.

The latest announcements from Facebook also suggest that they are looking at the advantages of ‘real-time web’. It seems as though Facebook is looking to transition towards becoming more public – some have said even more Twitter-like. Reports from last week also announced that Facebook will be beta testing a new publishing feature in which your Facebook status updates can be optionally made public. Essentially, this will allow users to use Facebook a lot like Twitter broadcasting your updates publically.

Source: Mashable