kjennings2 - 11:50 pm on Dec 27, 2009 (gmt 0)

What Microsoft and Google get on this deal is real time access to what millions of people are supposedly doing now. The trends, etc. Personal data worth its weight in gold. I don't think they're paying for web content so much as they're paying for personal data. Twitter's content is not very high quality, as most have noted.

Get this: with the IP's + user agent from where people are updating their tweets Google can cross that data with what you're doing on the share of the WWW they already monitor.

You'll see ads on unrelated sites, matched precisely to your recent twits.