Microsoft, Social Media | featured news

Professional social network LinkedIn is showing a little Microsoft love today.

Twitter is selling the rights to mine its communications hotbed to both Internet search leader Google and Microsoft in dueling deals that underscore the growing importance of being able to show what's on people's minds at any given moment.

Microsoft has struck non-exclusive search deals with Facebook and Twitter to integrate real-time status updates and tweets into Bing's search results. Microsoft online services division president Qi Lu and Yusuf Mehdi ...

The global rise of Facebook is nothing less than astounding. In the month of June alone it gained 24 million unique visitors worldwide, compared to the month before, for a total of 340 million unique visitors worldwide. It is now the fourth largest site in the world, trailing only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo sites, according to comScore (see table below).

Microsoft, in cooperation with Federated Media and Twitter, launched its own full-blown Twitter search engine today. BingTweets mashes up real-time Twitter search with results from Bing, Microsoft's new and increasingly popular search engine.

The software giant thinks it can make money in social networking the old-fashioned way - charging subscription fees.