Microsoft’s search engine Bing has managed to come to agreement with Twitter to extend its deal that incorporates Tweets into Bing, with the result that, for at least another two years, Tweets will be searchable through Bing.

Google had a similar deal until last July, but Microsoft and Google were not able to reach agreements over the terms of a renewed deal, with the result that, at least for the moment, the two are not working together here.
‘Tweet’ Deal

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News of the Microsoft-Twitter deal was announced, as might be expected, in a tweet exchange between Bing and Twitter, which also indicated that they would be “doing bigger and better things” together in the future.

The final part of the exchange went:

@Twitter Been thinking about our last 2 yrs together. Instantly tapping into the wisdom of the Twitter community. Good times. ^bb
@Twitter Let’s say we stick together and do bigger and better things? ^bb
@bing We’re in. Can’t wait for what comes next.

So at least superficially, they were both happy with the way things unfolded.
Bing, Twitter

Bing and Twitter originally got together in October 2009 at the Web 2.0 summit when Bing announced that it had agreed to index Twitter’s tweets on results pages.

As a result, Twitter is now integrated  into Bing’s social search website, which also includes updates from Facebook.

In July, AllThingsD reported that Twitter wanted about US$ 30 million per year for its real-time stream, about twice the amount of the original agreement.

It also said that Microsoft hadn’t agreed at that time to other Twitter demands, including more interface control, a larger cut of the ads sold next to its Tweets and more linking back to Twitter.

The Tweet exchange earlier this week did not say what the terms of the agreement between Bing and Twitter were, but there must have been some kind of compromise position around these terms.