Google will include Twitter’s real-time status updates into its search results, Google VP Marissa Mayer said in a blog post released this afternoon. This comes hot off the heels of Microsoft’s announcement this morning that it will include status update feeds from Facebook and Twitter into its search engine Bing. Continue »

Facebook’s 300 million users collectively spend more than 8 billion minutes on the site each day, according to the social network’s VP of engineering, Mike Schroepfer. He offered up the number onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit Wednesday as proof of the infrastructure challenges the social network faces relative to other web sites. On a busy day, an eye-popping 1.2 million photos are served on Facebook each second, he added.

And the more than 15,000 sites that have integrated Facebook Connect mean the site has API demands it has to address, too. Facebook was accessed via its API 5 billion times yesterday alone, according to Schroepfer. Continue »

Updated with detail from the Web 2.0 conference: Microsoft is set to announced this morning during the Web 2.0 Summit separate nonexclusive deals with Twitter and Facebook, deals that were first reported by Kara Swisher over at AllThingsD, which would enable Microsoft to serve real-time status updates from those two social sites within its Bing search engine. This news comes one day after Twitter CEO Evan Williams deferred a question about pending data mining deals with Microsoft and Google. Continue »

Twitter’s U.S. traffic to its main site has slowed, CEO Evan Williams said during a talk at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this afternoon, but said that the company was launching new things that “will pick that back up.”

It’s still unclear how the micromessaging site intends to make money, however. “It’s not like we’re spending our days looking in the couch cushions for our revenue model,” said Williams. “You wouldn’t raise that much money unless you have something plausible.” This was a clear reference to the company receiving $100 million funding last month that valued it at a whopping $1 billion. Continue »

Social networking has generally been discouraged in the workplace, with many corporate IT departments blocking access to sites like Facebook and MySpace due to privacy concerns. But these efforts are becoming increasingly futile as our lives continue to converge with social networks, analysts at a Gartner symposium said yesterday. Plus, social networking may even help workers “feel valued, a part of a community, and earn the respect of peers.” Privacy concerns surrounding social networks were brought up at our NewNet Bunker Series, where participants debated whether we should keep our data holed up in walled gardens or leave it open for developers to build upon. (Replay the event and read our live-blogging notes on GigaOM Pro, subscription required.) Continue »

Jeff Veen & Doug Bowman (L to R)

Our bandwidth and the speeds at which we access the web will grow fivefold over the next few years thanks to advances in wired and wireless technology. Not only are we connecting faster, but we’re also doing it from more places thanks to mobile broadband. These two things combined are creating a rush of data that will be generated and consumed. At a GigaOM Bunker Series event held today in San Francisco, a group of technologists explored how the next generation of the web will use location, sensors built into devices such as our mobile phones and other context clues to “give the Internet a body.” Continue »

kaChing, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup backed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and Open Table CEO Jeff Jordan, launched a web site today that aims to be a marketplace where anyone can access talented investors. With kaChing, people can choose to invest their money according to the trades of investors featured on the site. It first started out as an application on Facebook, which attracted hundreds of thousands of users who managed mock portfolios. Continue »