The social network overhauled the design of its news feed back in the spring to put the stream of real-time updates down the center of the page — similar to micromessaging site Twitter. It also created a “Highlights” section on the right-hand side of the page that contained select older content about your friends’ activity on the site, such as recently uploaded photo albums and links to articles and videos your friends shared. The new version is moving the “Highlights” section to the middle of the page, where it was located prior to the spring redesign.

When asked if Facebook is rolling out the new version to get away from looking similar to Twitter, Facebook product manager Peter Deng said, “I don’t think we were trying to be like Twitter. Status updates have been on the page since 2006.” He added: “We’re showing you content that’s more popular when you first log in. But when you switch to live feed, it looks how it does today.”

The latest news feed design just went live; it will be gradually rolled out to all of Facebook’s 300 million users throughout the day.

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Want to see when 4G is coming to your area? Here’s a guide:

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Without a doubt, it will be a tough road ahead for real-time search upstarts. Not only are Google and Microsoft household names, but Google has long dominated the U.S. search market — it captured 80 percent of it last month. A slate of real-time Twitter search engines sprouted up over the summer, and though many of them are compelling products, here’s a reality check: How many of your non-tech savvy friends actually know about them?

But it’s not all doom and gloom for some. After viewing Microsoft’s demo of its Twitter search feature on Bing, I discovered it’s lacking some of the features offered by other real-time search engines. TweetMeme, for instance, aggregates the most popular links on Twitter, including YouTube videos and photos, based in part on the number of times people have retweeted them. While Bing lets you see popular embedded links about a certain topic, so far it’s limited to just news and blog articles.

Another startup that offers something Bing doesn’t is OneRiot, which launched a product last month that offers up sponsored links to content related to the real-time search results it renders. OneRiot’s founders believe this product will be the standard monetization model for Twitter-focused apps, which could be potent enough to help the company stick around in the long-term.

There’s one caveat, however. Google’s Twitter search offering has yet to be released, so we’ll have to wait and see what kind of a threat it poses in the real-time search engine space.

Disclosure: Collecta is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Mayer wrote in the post:

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. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.

When asked at the Web 2.0 Summit if Facebook would reach a similar deal with Google, COO Sheryl Sandberg, a former Google executive, said this afternoon that the company had “nothing to announce.”

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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.

To accommodate all that data without damaging the user experience and stifling innovation, Schroepfer said Facebook has rewritten its memcache multiple times so that now deploys five times faster than before. But even though Facebook continues to augment its engineering team to keep up with its growing audience, he said there’s 1.2 million users per Facebook engineer. No wonder the company is looking to expand its staff by 40-50 percent this year.

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Financial terms of the deals are unknown. And the implications will be different for Twitter than for Facebook. While most status updates on Twitter are publicly searchable, updates on Facebook are primarily kept private between users and their friends. Not all of Facebook’s status updates will be searchable in Bing’s real-time feed, according to Swisher.

Update: Yusef Medhi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business, took the stage at the conference to demo a beta version of its Twitter real-time search feed, which is now live. Medhi identified Twitter as the leader in the real-time space and said its Facebook search feed will be rolled out later.

In the Bing Twitter feed, you can choose to see either the most recent tweets about a search term or the most relevant tweets about that term. To render a list of the most relevant tweets, Bing takes into account the author of the tweet, the quality of the message and how often it’s been retweeted.

Bing also provides a tag cloud of the most popular terms being discussed across the Twitter network and lets you see popular embedded links about a certain topic. For example, you can view a list of NY Yankees articles people are tweeting most about. Another plus is that Bing identifies the source of the article’s shortened URL, which prevents you from unknowingly clicking on a bad link.

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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.

Reports surfaced earlier this month that Twitter was in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google to serve real-time tweets in their search engines. But Williams was coy when asked onstage about these rumored search deals, quipping, “Whose deals?”

Right now, Twitter is toying with the idea of putting ads on its site, though co-founder Biz Stone said it doesn’t plan to do so this year. But last week, Twitter launched a mobile version of its service in Japan that will incorporate money-making features such as banner ads. This mobile version will be a testing ground for the company and will help determine whether it will ultimately incorporate advertising on its site. Twitter has also made clear that it will offer enterprise services for businesses, including analytics and verified accounts. Earlier this summer, the upstart made a step in that direction by rolling out its Twitter 101 web-based guide aimed at helping companies understand its service.

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While social networking in the office may foster community, there’s also a chance it could lead to better enterprise technology down the road. Investor Dave McClure yesterday declared that he wanted big players like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to take his data and use it to build helpful applications. An example of this concept would be the evolution of the Twitter network. The micromessaging site opens up most of its data to developers, who in turn build applications on top of the platform that offer features not found on Twitter.com.

For $79, get more with Social Media in the Enterprise, by Rachel Happe, along with dozens of other reports.

In the same vein, if tech companies were able to glean data on how workers interact with one another on social networks while in the office, this could spur ideas for future enterprise-focused social-networking applications that aim to facilitate communication and increase productivity and efficacy. Some enterprise social-network applications are already popping up, such as Yammer, an enterprise version of Twitter, and both Oracle and IBM have similar offerings called OraTweet and BlueTwit.

“While a job may be regarded as an economic transaction, the human brain thinks of the workplace as a social system,” Gartner analyst Carol Rozwell said yesterday.

And if corporate IT companies still aren’t convinced of the value of social-networking data, they could take a note from the CIA, which invested in a software firm that monitors social media activity on sites like Twitter and YouTube.

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• What Comes Next For the Web?
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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.”

In the future, metadata will be available on our mobile phones and it will provide computers with contextual information around data that developers create, according to Marc Davis, partner at Invention Arts and former chief scientist of Yahoo Mobile. By bridging the gap between pieces of information, particularly geolocation data, temporal information (when something is created) and other contextual information that Davis called the “who, what, when and where” clues, we’ll be able to help machines filter through data in ways that are more relevant for us. (Related post: Why Location Awareness Will Make the Web More Useful.)

Left to Right: Dave Winer (Scripting News), Bret Taylor (Facebook), Joe Smarr (Plaxo) & David Recordon (Facebook)

But in order to help people feel comfortable sharing these four Ws about themselves — notably where they are at any given moment — developers will have to address privacy issues, Yahoo’s FireEagle creator Tom Coates said. However, the cautious pace of making use of all of this data (in part because of worries about privacy implications) was derided by investor Dave McClure, who pleaded with the big players like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to gather his data and make useful applications with it.

Twitter was the star of a large chunk of the event, thanks to well-known designer Doug Bowman, who argued on behalf of his company and talked about creating a truly open, real-time site that offers up its metadata to all developers. So does Twitter, a company with less than 100 employees, feel threatened by developers building new features around its product? No, according to Bowman, who said that the company believes developers’ new ideas on how to enhance the Twitter platform are “phenomenal.”

Bret Taylor, Friendfeed & Facebook

One of those developers on hand today was Things Labs CEO Jason Shellen, who said the micromessaging site won’t get around to incorporating every feature developed by Twitter-focused applications. Thing Labs created Brizzly, a Twitter reader that launched in private beta this August, which offers features that Twitter doesn’t, such as a button that mutes the tweets of people you follow so they don’t show up in your update stream.

Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo), Salim Ismail (Singularity University) & John Hagel (Deloitte Touche)

The final segment of the event focused on the concept of serendipity, where the system is smart enough to provide you with information that you weren’t searching for, but is still useful — perhaps even more useful than what you were searching for in the first place.

John Hagel, a well-known author and co-chairman of Deloitte & Touche USA’s Silicon Valley-based research center, made an interesting observation about serendipity. “Serendipity is becoming more and more important. You have to be able to find things you didn’t even know existed — it becomes more and more critical to your success,” he said. “From my perspective, it’s more about serendipitous encounters with people, though, than information. “

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The startup’s founder, Daniel Carroll, who’s traded stocks since he was 15 years old, said the site provides people with a cheaper and more transparent alternative to putting their money in mutual funds. For example, people can make a minimum investment of $3,000 on the site. Carroll said Fairview Capital, for instance, generally doesn’t take investments less than $1 million, but it does so on kaChing. kaChing investors, who range from amateurs to investment management firms, are assigned an “Investing IQ” score that’s based on similar factors used by Ivy League endowment managers, such as risk adjusted returns and the quality of the rationale behind their trades. Investors who receive a score of 140 or higher are classified as a “Genius,” of which there are currently 12 on the site.

People who want to invest according to the trades of their selected kaChing investors have to pay a management fee to them kaChing, which averages around 1 percent. kaChing takes a 25 percent cut of that fee and gives 75 percent of it back to the investor. Once people set up an account, they can follow their investments in real-time on a dashboard, and the site sends email updates if an investor makes any unexpected moves. The site faces competition from Covestor, which also lets people track investors.

kaChing is a 12-person team. Carroll said it has raised around $3 million from angel investors. And he has big plans for the company, setting his sights on an IPO. “Hopefully, you’ll see our ticker on the New York Stock Exchange” five to ten years down the road, he said.

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