UPDATE 10/22 10:08 AM EST: Google just announced its capability to show Twitter updates in its search results. So much for Bing having any substantial upper hand.
Looks like Microsoft’s Bing gets the first shot at indexing the Twitter datastream, at least as part of the Bing brand itself (web nerds likely know there is a Greasemonkey Firefox script to show tweets in Google search results). It’s beta, of course, and Microsoft is paying Twitter for non-exclusive use of the Twitter datastream. You can try it here.
This is a great first step, but the next one is taking Twitter data and actually integrating it into Bing search results instead of putting the functionality in a separate sandbox. Nonetheless, I applaud Microsoft for being innovative and working hard to make this happen before Google.
Nice to see. Competition is always good.