seocracy - 5:01 pm on Dec 21, 2009 (gmt 0)

First time I've ever posted here....but I read alot....

anyways, my two cents...

GOOG/MSFT arent paying to index the site...they're paying for access to the firehose of tweets. Content moves at such an extreme pace on twitter that it would be truly impossible to crawl and index all tweets in real time without crashing twitters HTTP front-end......so they've arranged a deal to have access to the backend firehose without having to actually crawl them.

This is not some change in the web's 'ecosystem', and this isn't an example of SE's paying to index a site....

It's just a content sharing deal...and these deals happen all the time (perhaps on much smaller scale)