I'm not surprised that search engines like Google and Bing are now including the content of My Space , Facebook and Twitter in search results. The output is a near real-time fire hose of data combined with the historical data already available in the index. Facebook this week made radical changes to its privacy policy and it now exposing all of our status updates to the outside world (unless we restrict it). The walled garden days of Facebook are over as Mark Zuckerberg is chasing the real-time web pioneered by his competition for audience at Twitter. The question is....will this add to the value of search or detract? More data isn't always the answer.
However there seems to be immediate value to leverage this new data flow in the social media and social networking landscape. For the first time since conventional search sites were launched we don't have to wait weeks or days for our content to find its way into the 30th page of the index results all we have to do is use our favorite social networking portals and we become an instant part of the conversation around these results.
Here is a example using the search query IBM in real-time mode at Google. The first 5 results are from social networking site Twitter. The last two are from .com style websites.
I think there is a role for both types of data in the search world, the new aggregated access to content flow from Twitter and Facebook etc adds a new dimension to what we can leverage on these services. While giving us the depth of content we need for more conventional research.