
Twitter declined to comment when contacted the company for confirmation.
The partnership would give Google access to Twitter’s data ‘fire hose’ again, something that search rivals Yahoo and (Microsoft) Bing already enjoy. Twitter and Google struck a similar agreement back in 2009, but it was not renewed in 2011. That left Google needing to crawl the Twitter services to index tweet — a process that takes time. Terms of this apparent new deal will make tweets visible inside Google’s search results immediately after they are tweeted out.
This coming together would be significant for a couple of reasons. Bloomberg’s sources claim there is no advertising revenue deal here, but Google will reportedly pay “data-licensing” revenue. That’s a revenue line item that Twitter grew from $16 million to $41 million in the past year, and — with Google on board — there’s more to come.
The deal may be positive for Twitter, but it could have implications for Google’s own social network.
One of the positive features about Google+, the company’s own social service, was that updates prominently in search results — potentially driving new traffic websites and bringing more business for companies. The prospect of real-time Twitter returning is yet another signal that Google is stepping off the gas for Google+ — Vic Gundotra, who lead the service, left Google last April, as the company started viewing Google+ as a platform rather than a product.