Google, Microsoft and Twitter in Data Mining Talks

Separate talks are underway for Twitter with both Google and Microsoft over licensing deals for real-time search results from the micro-blogging site, according to the Wall Street Journals AllThingsD in a post yesterday. Will this be the elusive monetization route for Twitter? Will one of the search engines one-up the other? (Most analysts doubt Twitter would limit itself to an exclusive deal) All three companies have declined to comment.

Deals could take the form of upfront lump sum payments, or revenue sharing payments, but the potential income for Twitter would be in the millions either way. Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder, has repeatedly told media that his company is focused on building more features for the site for the time being, rather than having worries about business models. Having recently raised $100 million in funding, they are certainly not in any cash crunch, and can negotiate from a position of strength. So another outcome of the talks could very be that no deal is struck at all.

Ironically, at the same time as this story came out, Twitter users were experiencing a blackout as Twitter was down for an unplanned site outage which turns out to have been a server-side bug rather than a DDOS attack.