Microsoft still has some fight in it yet, folks! It's not often that other companies are scrambling to keep up with them these days.
The first company to release the feature won't matter much in the end, it's all about implementation and market share..
So I wouldn't call it "scrambling", more just a "why yes, we've thought of this too, and we're working on it"..
http://bing.com/twitter is pretty ugly, and seems to not be working currently.
Who has the better integration and implementation is far more interesting.
huh? Both announced they were going to use twitter data :/
It all depends who presents that information in a useful way - my money is on google reading their blog post. I hardly think google are 'scrambling to keep up with them'.
You're right that it still remains to be seen who puts the data to better use in the long term, though.
1) When MS signed a non-exclusive agreement with Twitter, they must have been 99% sure that Google would be in on the Twitter action as well (i.e. I doubt they ever thought they were one up on Google), and
2) The point is that Google is not already there. All they have to show for themselves is an agreement so far. (MS has http://www.bing.com/twitter up and running already.)
Being first to market isn't everything, but I still think this is a noteworthy exception to the norm of recent years.
There are various reasons for that:
1) it sets a bad precedence. Up until now, all (significant) content was accessible to the search engines without barrier and to index the web, aside of general algorithmic improvements, no changes in the way how spiders work were needed.
2) I don't see why Twitter should decide who can and who can't access the content I made publically available (by tweeting). This should be open to anybody requiring the data.
2) The information in twitter, frankly, does not need to be exposed into Google as it IMHO does not contain enough original information. Twitter is about conversations and links to stuff that is in the search engines anyways and the conversations don't really provide that much added value.
3) Twitter gains as much (or even more - see above) from Engines indexing them as the engines gain from being able to index Twitter.
And lastly: In all other places of the internet that are indexed by search engines, I as the author can specify whether I want the content I create to be indexed or not (robots.txt, X-No-Archive-Headers and so on).
As far as I can see, there is no way to make my conversations not appear in Google or any other place - and yes: Conversations. Tweets are not always real content, but often times just bits and pieces of conversations.
In a perfect world:
1) there would be a standard on how to feed search engines (or any other interested party) with that content.
2) Twitter and other micro blogging services would adhere to said standard
3) Twitter and other micro blogging services would allow me as a user to chose whether my insignificant content is archived/indexed or not, preferably per tweet.
