San Francisco — Google and MySpace have taken the real-time plunge. During a search event in December, Google introduced its Real-Time Search service, which already is a useful feature that utilizes updates from various sources like Twitter and FriendFeed. Now, MySpace, which has been trying to keep pace in the real-time, has been added to the service.
The MySpace content joins other sources of Google real-time search results, Google users will now see MySpace status updates running down the page along with tweets from Twitter and Facebook’s FriendFeed, which users can surf by choosing the “Updates” or “Latest” options for filtering results.
The MySpace status updates will include links not only to short Twitter-like messages but also to photos and blog posts, according to Jones.
According to MySpace, “This partnership augments our users’ ability to share and showcase content across the open Web and gives people outside the MySpace network even more ways to discover new content,” wrote MySpace co-president Mike Jones in a blog post on Tuesday.
“Starting today, when users carry-out search on Google, publicly available MySpace status updates will be displayed in Google’s Real-Time search results. The results provide a live picture of what our users are thinking and doing as it relates to any given search topic, and results are ranked so that only the freshest and most relevant data appears,” the post read.
Anyway, the MySpace folks are pretty much excited about it nonetheless. In fact, MySpace needs all the assistance it can get on the traffic front. Once the world’s top social network, MySpace ceded that position to Facebook in 2008 after its popularity cooled off significantly.
For Google, incorporating status updates in its search results is quite essential as people and marketers increase their use of Twitter and similar micro-blogging and social networking services. Meanwhile, MySpace expects to benefit from Web traffic generated by its visibility on Google’s real-time search results.
Even as it goes through a management upheaval with CEO Owen Van Natta suddenly resigned last week, the social network has been trying to stay in the lime-light by opening up access to data. If you are overcurious about it, you might want to try searching and find out if you will be getting live updates from MySpace users such as news, photos, and blog posts as part of the Google search results.
MySpace streams will appear only if they were made public by MySpace members. To consume and index the MySpace content, Google’s search engine is tapping a MySpace API (application programming interface) that makes these real-time posts available.
Other competitors like Twitter have been trying to develop by promoting a basic substructure of status updates while relying on an ecosystem of developers to create sophisticated applications.