Twitter, the microblogging company which lets users express their thoughts in text message-length bursts, has proven itself the most desirable property on the internet by announcing deals with both Microsoft and Google yesterday.
Early yesterday, it seemed that Microsoft had stolen an important march over its younger, dominant rival in the search engine market, when it triumphantly announced that it would offer a facility to search tweets in real time through its newly rebranded search engine, Bing.
"Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine. The power of those tweets as a form of data that can be surfaced in search is enormous," said Paul Yiu, its head of search, on a Microsoft blog.
He continued: "Were you as fascinated by the 6-year-old boy floating away in a balloon as we were? Was it a hoax? We know that people are going to twitter more and more for information surrounding all the latest chatter ... You can now search for what people are saying all over the web about breaking news topics, your favourite celebrity, hometown sports team, and anything else you use Twitter to stay on top of today."
The announcement was widely regarded as a coup for Microsoft, which has struggled to gain any leverage in the search market compared to Google, which has a market share of more than 70% in almost every western country. Despite a deal to power Yahoo's search, Bing has been struggling to break through 15% of searches.
Reports of the deal with Microsoft began to emerge early yesterday, and were confirmed in the afternoon when Yiu appeared on stage at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco where, on Tuesday, Twitter's chief executive Evan Williams had spoken about some of his plans for the company, though not about search.
But in a blogpost confirming the tie-up with Microsoft, Biz Stone, Twitter's co-founder, was notably circumspect about whether it would be an exclusive deal.
"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'. We hope more working relationships with organisations in the search business will mean even more variety for users," Stone wrote.
The subsequent deal with Google - announced at 10pm BST - promises a similar tie-up, though unlike Bing, the results will not be available immediately.
"We are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results," said Marissa Mayer, the vice-president of search and user experience. "We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months."
But while the deal does leave Microsoft and Google in almost exactly the same place that they were 24 hours ago - though Microsoft's Bing has begun to integrate tweets already, while Mayer's description suggests a delay - it confers a huge benefit to Twitter, which is understood to be receiving payments from both companies for providing access to its content.
That could be an important first step towards generating significant revenues for the company, which has resisted calls for it to be more open about its business plans.