First, Matt McGee reports on Search Engine Land that Bing now provides search history with their auto-suggest feature that appears when the search box "drops down" and offers search term suggestions.
Queries from your search history will appear in purple, while other queries will show in blue. The auto-suggest box offers options like “Manage History” and “History Off” for searchers who don’t this feature enabled.
Second, Twitter is now allowing several search tools to have access to their "firehose" feed. This feed provides access to EVERY TWEET in real-time. Some Twitter tools don't have Firehose access.
Twitter has long kept a very tight grip on just who can have access to the stream of Twitter updates. All of them, that is. Limited access is open to anyone and everyone who wants to play.
According to the company, some 50,000 are using the rate limited APIs. Twitter was long rumored to give out very limited access to the firehose (all tweets in real time) due to scaling problems. More people pulling in data means more server load, something which Twitter always has too much of.
Whatever is true, Twitter is finally loosening their grip, and giving some new companies access to the firehose. All the data as it comes in, it’s a potential goldmine.
Recently we’ve announced partnerships with Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft. These Web leaders gained access beyond our free offerings—we licensed them the full feed of all public tweets.
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More than fifty thousand interesting applications are currently using our freely available, rate-limited platform offerings. With access to the full Firehose of data, it is possible to move far beyond the Twitter experiences we know today. In fact, we’re pretty sure that some amazing innovation is possible.
Companies like Google and Microsoft have already gotten a headstart on mining Twitter’s data after signing agreements to incorporate tweets into real-time search. Terms were not disclosed, but Bloomberg reported that the deals made the company profitable with $25 million in additional revenue. Some of the larger startups in Twitter’s ecosystem like Seesmic and Tweetmeme also have had financial arrangements for deeper data access for some time, although they also have not disclosed details.
Finally. this will not be the week Google doesn't make an acquisition.
This afternoon we learned that Google had acquired Picnik, a web-based photo editing service.
The Picnik service is offered through Picasa, Google’s photo storage site. Although the company says users will still be able to access other social networking and photo storage sites from Picnik, the sale leaves an open question about how long the service will continue to run on some of its competitor sites in the future, including Facebook, Flickr and Photoworks.
The sale puts Google in yet another competing business with Adobe, going up against Photoshop.com, and with Apple and the basic photo editing tools within iPhoto.
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