That's news to us. Everything these days is about Twitter, though. Go to a party--talk about Twitter. Have a blog? Talk about Twitter. Use Twitter? Talk about Twitter. Apparently we can add to that: facing legal pressure over allegedly anti-competitive business practices? Talk about Twitter. There's absolutely no more information available about this - but below are three possible scenarios we can imagine for Google integrating microblogging into its search product.

Real Time Search

The most logical integration of microblogging and search would be microblogging search. Google already indexes Twitter messages, in some ways better than Twitter does. We can imagine "real time" being an option just like web, news, images and blogs on Google search. Here at ReadWriteWeb we use this tool to have that experience already. There is a whole lot that can be done with something like Twitter search if the user accounts tweeting the twits and twats are taken into account. Check out the nascent awesomeness at Twazzup, for example.

This probably isn't going to happen, though, as long as Twitter is the only microblogging game in town. There just isn't a meaningful data set of publicly available status updates elsewhere. Facebook status messages would be great to search but that would contradict the fundamental nature of the site - and Microsoft has a lot of skin in the game there.

We're hoping that open source microblogging technology from Laconi.ca will spread throughout the land and give engines something other than Twitter to search.

Augmenting Pagerank

Inbound links are the primary way that Google determines what's a good page to serve up for any search query. Fresh links from the micro-blogo-o-sphere could well augment the traditional metric with some timeliness.

This is something we explored yesterday in a post about Twitter and how it is not going to index the pages you share links to. It's going to have 3rd party companies perform that function and maybe buy one or more of them.

We don't think Google is going to integrate microblogging in this way though. Why not? Because it would be silly. Google is already fast enough, good enough and doggone it - people like it.

What Are You Doing?

You know what's most likely? That Google will add the equivelant of "what are you doing?" to its search interface. Perhaps "what are you searching for?" Messages posted and available to read through that interface will be to and from your Google Contacts. (That's the people you Gmail with, basically.) Google is making a big push for people to take their Google Profiles more seriously and one consequence of that could be a well populated social graph for users.

Friends could help answer the questions you're asking of Google or they could let you know what they are doing, like a home town version of Google News. If you check out Google Friend Connect, imagining that integrated into search isn't hard at all.

Social search and status sharing. It's a lot less crazy than Google's search wiki.

The paradigm of status sharing and activity streams is just too compelling for Google to stay out of it. Maybe they will buy FriendFeed. Maybe they will build something themselves and maybe it will be good.

Schmidt's hint yesterday only makes sense, though. How can you imagine the integration of microblogging into search looking?

The Schmidt story was found in Brad Williamson's excellent FriendFeed group Media News and Analysis - thanks Brad!

In the absence of real interoperability between the different microblogging and messaging services, Twitter, which already has the most users, will only gain momentum. With Identi.ca and Laconi.ca, we do have real, open-source, standard-based alternatives to Twitter, but the sheer momentum behind Twitter will make it increasingly hard for newcomers to break through to a large enough audience.

In many ways, this is quite a shame, as most of the innovation around Twitter has come from third-party developers, while services like Rejaw, for example, tried out a lot of interesting features and user interfaces. Rejaw, for example, made 'real' real-time messaging a core feature of its platform.

Microblogging

With Motion's microblogging feature, blogs can create either a private or public microblog or both. A private microblog could be used for internal employee or team collaboration, for example, whereas a public microblog would let you share with your online community. Arising from the ashes of Pownce, the company acquired by Movable Type back in December, this feature has some resemblance to that service as it also includes richer microblogging features that the former Pownce competitor Twitter does. In fact, Motion's microblogging service is more like FriendFeed as it allows you to post links, images, audio, and video in addition to text.

Activity Streams

Also like FriendFeed, Motion includes an activity streams feature which they call "Action Streams." These streams are created by members collecting and sharing information from over 150 other sites supported by Six Apart's Action Streams service that launched in January 2009. The difference between Action Streams, which are implemented using a special blog plugin, and similar social networking services like FriendFeed or Plaxo is control. Site owners can selectively choose to show or hide individual actions in this decentralized framework. Also, Action Streams are published using Atom and the Microformat hAtom standard so they are not trapped in any one service.

Authentication Tools

Another aspect to Motion is its authentication tools which let users sign in with any existing account from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, or any OpenID provider. According to Movable Type, this opens up your community to over half a billion web users who can now comment or vote on your content without having to create a new account. However, members who wish to participate in the microblog as opposed to just the blog itself are still encouraged to register with the site. Movable Type believes this strikes a good balance between allowing for participation while also providing a compelling reason to register with an online community.

Profiles

Finally, Motion users are provided with online profiles which show their actions from around the web. Site members can follow each other and upload profile pictures just as they would on any other social network. As with the company's other blogging products like TypePad and Vox, members' profiles can also list their other accounts from around the web. These are imported by using Microformats to link to those sites.

Getting Started

If you're curious about what Motion looks like in action, you can check it out on BikeHugger (click on "Latest Activity" to see Action Streams) or visit the microblogging community on Real Estate Channel. You can also sign up for a demo for more information.

Current Movable Type Pro users can go here to download the plugin.

Features

'Moments,' as thisMoment calls your updates, appear in a side-scrolling slideshow at the bottom of the screen. They can include multiple photos and videos, which you can import from Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, and YouTube. You can also upload pictures and videos directly to thisMoment.

The central element for browsing thisMoment is the timeline, which consists of a series of bars at the top of the page. You can assign a specific importance to different 'moments', which is then represented by the height of the bar in your timeline. Different types of events also come with different colors. This is a surprisingly elegant way of browsing through individual timelines, but it also makes finding specific events relatively hard, has the timelines don't actually have dates on them.

As you would expect from a social site, you can follow other users, and send messages to your friends and family members on the service.

Geared Towards the Mainstream

ThisMoment is clearly geared towards a mainstream audience. It does have the ability to send updates to your Twitter account, but there are no embeddable widgets or other export functions for your photos or videos. For the most parts, thisMoment is a closed off silo. There is also no way to send images or videos to it from outside of the service. You can't email a picture to thisMoment, for example, and have it appear in your timeline.

Verdict: Pretty, Fun, But Limited

Most users won't mind (and may even appreciate) that the service lives in a walled garden. The site is definitely a great place for sharing updates about your kids or your travels, and thisMoment's user interface is very pretty, though sometimes to the detriment of its functionality. Why, for example, is the actual content relegated to the bottom half of the screen, even when browsing through the photos and videos of an event?

Advanced users will probably want more functionality than thisMoment currently offers. We would like to see RSS feeds from thisMoment, for example, so that we could broadcast our updates to FriendFeed or other services besides Twitter.

The service lets users send a message through one interface (SMS, IM, web publishing tools) and then automatically cross posts it to more than 30 other social networking sites. It's a way to broadcast your messages into more networks than you could otherwise participate in. Now with some very visible investment, the company should be able to scale and roll out even more features.

Ping.fm is just one of a number of companies trying to help users get their content out into multiple social networks automatically. They are all a little bit different. New entrant Tarpipe may offer the most sophisticated user controls and Pixelpipe stores high resolution copies of the photos and video it broadcasts in lower quality. There are a number of different services like this, but Ping.fm may be the most popular and now it's getting a big boost from Ito and Hoffman.

Reid Hoffman was one of a number of early PayPal execs who made out well when eBay bought their company in 2002. Now referred to as "the PayPal mafia," the group sticks together informally to invest in or work for their many small investments in new Web 2.0 companies. (See, for example, our news breaking coverage of another PayPal team member, Dave McClure, joining the high profile Founders Fund last week.) This group has been closely tied to the early days of YouTube, Facebook and Digg. For an excellent and engaging history of the connections between all these companies, see Sarah Lacy's new book Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good.

Getting an investment from Hoffman could bode well for future, larger, fund raising efforts by Ping.fm. Hoffman is in touch with many of the hottest projects on the web - he's on the Board of Mozilla, Kiva.org, gaming company Zynga and a number of other companies.

Lacy calls Hoffman a "friend-tor," as opposed to an investor. He's among the group of young technologists who have experienced the good and bad about institutional investors and can relate to young technologists who need to be more cautious than most people were in the first web bubble. Plus LinkedIn is awesome, so we're sure Hoffman offers good advice.

Joi Ito has an equally impressive resume (see his Wikipedia profile, for example). He was an early stage investor in Flickr, Last.fm and many other very interesting companies.

Will these two investors make a big difference in helping Ping.fm in particular, and cross posting to multiple social networks, a standard part of life online? Only time will tell, but with the proliferation of niche social networks and the long tail of participation online across networks large and small - it makes sense. Consider the growth of mobile media publishing as well and there's all the more reason to get your content out of a single silo of Flickr, or Twitter. Hoffman and Ito have already bet on it.

Me2Day is purportedly "a big proponent of open web technologies." A cursory glance at the Me2Day site reveals that they allow login by OpenID, something its US equivalent has yet to do.

According to Wikipedia, Naver was launched in June 1999 and has since grown to be the most popular search portal in Korea. In October 2007, comScore ranked Naver - owned by NHN Corporation - as the fifth most used search portal in the world.

There is no word on how Naver plans to incorporate Me2Day functionality into its offerings.

What's even better is that you can click on the notification in the Activity Stream to see all the relevant details. If the item was an image, for example, you can preview it or download the original. For blog posts and wiki pages, you can click to read the item that was updated. Plus, you can download any files that have been added straight from the Activity Stream to your desktop.

However, the cyn.in desktop client isn't just about automated notifications - it allows for those personal updates, too. But this is the enterprise, mind you, so we're not calling them "tweets" here - they are "status updates" instead. Guided by the prompt "What are you doing?" anyone can quickly set their status update which is then sent into the Activity Stream to update everyone else.

Taking a page from Jaiku's book, the client also includes a threaded discussions feature. Any item in the stream can be commented on whether it's an automated update or a personal status update. The replies can be viewed in a pop-up sidebar to the right of the original Activity Stream, just as with photos, wikis, and blog updates. Like FriendFeed, when someone comments on an item, that item bubbles up to the top so everyone is immediately alerted.

As any Twitter user could tell you, no microblogging product would be complete without search, and cyn.in is no exception. When you need to find something that had been posted before and has since fallen off the page, you can enter in a query straight into the desktop client itself. The results returned are ranked for you according to the percentage match and you can scroll through them just as you can with the Activity Stream.

The cyn.in client is beautiful implementation of how microblogging could (and perhaps should) work for businesses, but it's the client's integration with the cyn.in team collaboration suite that makes it so worthwhile. Of course, the decision to move away from your company's current collaboration suite is not one to be made lightly, so you should review the suite's features before deciding if it's right for you.

Other enterprise microblogging clients include Yammer, Present.ly, and Status, but none offer an integrated collaboration suite, too. Cyn.in is open source, but it can also be purchased as a hosted service or as an enterprise appliance.

Since its inception in 2007, Vator.tv mostly focused on video, but, as Kedric Van de Carr, Vator.tv's VC of Marketing and Business Development, told us, adding micro-blogging to Vator.tv's arsenal of features was a logical next step. According to Van der Carr, Vator.tv wants to give entrepreneurs the option to give frequent updates about their company that would usually not be worth a press release or even a post on the company blog.

On Vator.tv, you can now follow these companies and their updates will appear in your 'my Vator' tab. Looking at the stream right now, it seems like the companies in the alpha program are making good use of the service and often use it to get input from the community.

Competition for Twitter?

Vator.tv considers itself as a competitor to social networks like Twitter and company blogs, but according to Van der Carr, one of the main advantages of Vator.tv is that it can tell companies who exactly their followers are. Vator.tv gives its users statistics about its followers, including whether they are students, investors, or business owners.

We have seen a lot of specialized social networks lately that weren't very interesting, but judging from the reaction of the companies' in the alpha program, Vator.tv looks like it may have hit upon a nerve within the startup community.

The Pownce team says it plans to "come back with something much better in 2009." We're excited to see what Pownce co-founders Leah Culver and Mike Malone do at SixApart; it should be a very good environment for them to innovate in.

Though these startups were inspiring, we also think it quite noteworthy that even at a down time economically there are still jobs for super smart people. We covered the Pownce/SixApart deal in greater depth at our hire-tracking site Jobwire. See that coverage for more details about the technology that Pownce will bring to SixApart.

This growth makes sense given the rush of new users these companies must be experiencing. It's not just growing hype, either. The combination of collaboration, intelligence gathering and ease of use make micro-messaging or micro-blogging a compelling addition to millions of peoples' work and personal lives.

Mainstream Media Love

The huge audiences of old school media outfits are getting regular introductions to Twitter these days. CNN's Rick Sanchez frequently interacts with his thousands of Twitter friends while discussing current events on his show. Newsweek featured Twitter messages prominently on the front page of its website during election day. The Wall St. Journal says that Twitter is now mainstream. That's getting harder and harder to deny.

We wrote on Monday about the Toronto Globe and Mail's decision to move star technology reporter Mathew Ingram into an online community manager role, including being responsible for getting the newspaper better integrated with communities on Twitter.

It appears that Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, also the founder of paradigm shattering Blogger.com, now has another epochal hit on his hands. The company has received several rounds of venture funding and announced this week that it's getting ready to expand its staff again with more new hires.

It's Not Just Twitter

There's a whole slew of microblogging services to choose from. We wrote about a comparative survey of just the ones useful for business users, earlier this week. The market leader in that emerging field may be Yammer, who report that more than 10 thousand businesses have had Yammer networks set up for employees or co-workers. According to an update from LinkedIn, Yammer recently brought another senior staff member over from parent company Geni. Just like Twitter was an off-shot of startup Odeo, Geni may end up eclipsed by Yammer.

A different but related animal is open source microblogging service Laconi.ca. We wrote enthusiastically about this company the day it went live. It's hard to know how many Laconi.ca installs are up and running, but this tiny company just quadrupled its staff this week with its first three full time hires.

We'll be watching for more growth news from companies in this sector but all indications now are that this is a communication paradigm making a rapid ascent and there are business decisions being made that demonstrate that.

For the scores of people now convinced that a group micromessaging service like Twitter can be powerfully useful, there are few prospects as interesting as the use of such a tool at work - for work. There are lots of different software options, though, and it's hard to know which one to select. Enter a new report from Pistachio Consulting, topic area experts and providers of an excellent new report on the options.

Pitsachio argues that these kinds of tools are good for everything from corporate intelligence to professional development, from bridging silos to reducing email clutter to harnessing loose ties in an organization. As serious "microsharing" users, we believe these benefits are intuitive, realistic and compelling.

The report includes a matrix comparison of nineteen different vendors, from the already commercialized Yammer to still-unlaunched mega app ESME. Data points on the matrix are: inside firewall, directory integration, twitter's functions, Groups, Location, Sharing, SMS, IM , Desktop Client, smartphone app, twitter integration, underlying software platform, API, twiter compatible API, largest company using, largest group and pricing.

Below is an embedded version of the matrix, read on for highlights.

Enterprise Micro Sharing Tools

Highlights

The report says that Twitter itself may soon offer an enterprise tool, based on statements by company CEO Evan Williams. That doesn't necessarily mean that it will be the best option, however. Benefits and reservations are listed for all the tools surveyed, though the ones specifically built by enterprises themselves are the least-reviewed. That's unfortunate.

Some lessons learned from three year-long deployments of these kinds of tools, from companies IBM, Guitar Center and HotTopic, are included in the report.

The Pistachio report is well written and enjoyable to read. It will answer many of your questions about this field and will help point you smartly toward some software options you likely didn't know about before.

Find the full report at the Pistachio website.

When I asked him about Yammer, Timothy positioned Socialcast as "more Friendfeed than Twitter". He means that Socialcast takes a wider scope and can connect to outside web feeds such as Delicious, RSS feeds, LinkedIn profiles - aggregating all of them and surfacing them to other employees.

That makes sense for enterprises. Data integration is usually a winning formula.

What About Basecamp?

Outside the Blogosphere, the one product that seems to breaking into enterprise mainstream - possibly in the "early majority" phase - is Basecamp. So we had to ask Socialcast: "how do you position yourself related to Basecamp?"

Timothy said he is a big admirer of 37 Signals and Basecamp (as many of us are), but that the difference is that Basecamp is project centric, whereas Socialcast is more ad hoc.

By adding categories and groups, you can make Socialcast "project like", but its core is simply unstructured messaging enabling serendipity.

Reducing Organizational Spam

This was a phrase Timothy used in connection with email. He did not claim it as a phrase he invented and Google does not show it in common use, but it resonated with my experience. What these new messaging tools enable is a more fine-grained subscribe/unsubscribe process.

Enterprises look at email, IM, blogging, microblogging as all messaging. As such they have to worry about things like Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) compliance and other control issues. You know, all those emails from bankers saying privately "this stock is worthless" while pumping it publicly to investors. To be in the enterprise space, you have to live and breath this control stuff. Socialcast understands it.

Deployment Model

Socialcast can be deployed in two ways:

a) SaaS
b) Behind a firewall appliance

This pragmatism is now common amongst winning SaaS vendors. They don't turn away clients who want it deployed in their own data centers, but the appliance avoids all the implementation and version control hassles.

Revenue Model

A simple, low cost subscription model is good enough for Zoho, 37 Signals and it also works for Socialcast. They give the first 5 users free, enabling pilot trials. But there is no fancy "free but then we hook you with a paid version" model (which enterprises tend to be suspicious about).

Business Basics

Socialcast is 3 years young, San Diego based, has 11 employees, has been profitable since their second quarter, and is growing 100% year on year. They raised a small convertible round with private investors in December 2007, after they were already profitable.

Big cheer to another Gritty Entrepreneur!

Clearly, some of the recent hires and acquisitions have worked out very well for Twitter. As Jack Dorsey notes in the latest update on the Twitter blog, Twitter has finally achieved a point where the team is not just constantly fighting brush fires. Instead, the team is now finally able to, as Dorsey puts it, 'craft' solutions features.

Looking at the latest stats from Compete, it seems Twitter is still growing at a nice clip, which makes the fact that the team has been able to stabilize the system an even greater achievement.

Now, we're tentatively raising our hopes once again. As VentureBeat reports, Jaiku is back after several days spent offline in a move to Google's datacenters as they continue their move to Google's App Engine service, the Google answer to Amazon's web services stack. In addition, there is now a brand-new TOS that existing users must accept upon login, which brings the original up to Google standards, presumably.

However, what's most exciting is that users now have unlimited invites to share with their friends, a step we hope is just the first of many in Jaiku's rebirth. Yet, as exciting as a Google Twitter-like service is, so much time has passed that Twitter has the market share and mindshare of those that want to participate in a micro-blogging community. Jaiku has a long battle ahead if they truly want to compete now.

New on 12seconds.tv

Soon after their successful public launch, 12seconds.tv implemented a host of new goodies to make the service more appealing for its users. The most popular new feature is the daily challenge. The service asks users to respond to a particular challenge of the day. A new challenge appears everyday. While it's fun to participate in the challenges, users can also win rewards for their participation.

API Launch

Today the service is launching the first version of their API. To give users and developers a taste of what can be done, 12seconds.tv has partnered with a great Twitter client known as TweetDeck, another video-blogging service known as Phreadz, and micro-review site Blippr. Now you can keep up with your friend's 12seconds videos right from TweetDeck and leave your own micro video comment on Blippr reviews.

It's a Micro-world Today Folks!

The latest additions to 12seconds.tv's offerings should be well received by users and fans of the service. Quite frankly, I'm more than excited to be able to use 12seconds.tv from TweetDeck. Let us know what you think about the latest API offerings from 12seconds.tv in our comments section.