Facebook has been in an ongoing fight against spam and yesterday announced a significant victory in court. The company said it had obtained an eye-popping $711 million judgment against Spam King Sanford Wallace who had had posted unwanted messages on Facebook users’ Walls. Wallace, who is reportedly bankrupt may also face time in the big house. According to the Facebook blog:

While we don’t expect to receive the vast majority of the award, we hope that this will act as a continued deterrent against these criminals. Most notably, the judge referred Wallace to the U.S. Attorney’s Office with a request that Wallace be prosecuted for criminal contempt, which means that in addition to the judgment, he now faces possible jail time.

Late last year Facebook won an even larger, $873 million judgment against Canadian spammer, Adam Guerbuez and Atlantis Blue Capital.

Facebook implores users to identify and report spammers to the company. Keeping Facebook spam-free helps users but it’s equally critical for the continued health and usage of Facebook more broadly.

Microsoft’s Qi Lu announced two new partnerships today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Here’s a transcript of his chat with Tim O’Reilly.

Qi Lu

I was at Yahoo for 10 years, and I always told Jerry, after 10 years I’m going to try something new. I went to Microsoft because I wanted to have an impact.

Search is about computationally understanding user intent. Understanding their interests and needs. That’s “absolutely” our long-term goal – to “build a mind-reader.” Once you understand user intent, you can figure out different solutions. There are many queries where images are best at fulfilling intent. Sometimes videos are best at fulfilling intent.

Ahead, you have Facebook and Twitter – particularly Twitter. There’s a strong velocity of things flowing through that will enable people to get answers.

Yusuf Mehdi to do a demo now.

Bing launched about 100 days ago and off to a pretty good start.

People will start to ask more complicated questions. To answer that, you need better access to data. Starts demo of Bing Wave 2. Shows recent photo search tool. “It changes the way you do search.” Shows example of search for “top iPhone apps” — this has “really resonated with consumers.”

Second area is about real-time, hot information. Two announcements:

Partnership with Twitter. Been working on it a long time. We will get access to all public Twitter information in real-time. “We’re gonna do some really exciting things.”

Other partnership is with Facebook to get access to all of their public data, and that will come at a later date.

Now showing example of Twitter integration. Shows full, real-time feed. Looks like existing Twitter search, just wrapped in Bing interface. Will update automatically.

Bing applies “best Match” technology to tweets: de-duping, then focus on

quality – look at who’s tweeting and assign soicla relevance score popularity – look at the caption – length of comment, links, etc., affect quality and relevance usefulness – number of retweets affects results

Then we apply spam filtering.

Bing also shows hottest topics on Twitter – a tag cloud. Looking at tweets related to these items – Bing takes most popular links and assigns its relevance algorithm, then shows the hottest links, too.

Pick a topic like “Yankees” – Bing shows most recent tweets, then shows most popular links. Bing pulls out landing domain from shortened URLs.

This is beta code. Sean Suchter working on it at headquarters. Should be available shortly at bing.com/twitter.

Demo over. Qi Lu speaking again.

We don’t disclose financial terms with Twitter. “I don’t know specific length of agreement. This is a start.”

The key thing is to have great teams, great technology, and keep the pace of innovation.

Audience questions now.

Qi: In a real-time corpus like Twitter, there’s a lot of signal velocity. The Twitter corpus is still evolving. But based on what we see, you have enough signals to have meaningful content. A lot is meta content that refers to other content on the web. But this is just the beginning. The future is very compelling.

Are you keeping the Twitter stream? Are you archiving the firehose?

Qi Lu: Don’t want to answer because I may not be accurate.

The Twitter deal is non-exclusive.

Bing new Bing Twitter Search has gone live today, made possible through a new deal cut with Twitter. Below, a close-up look at features in the new service.

Bing Twitter? Bing Facebook? Bing Social Search?

“Bing Twitter Search” is my name for the new service. Bing tells me officially, it’s called “Bing Twitter.” That sounds awkward, two brands next to each other (as opposed to Bing Video or Bing Images, which combine the Bing brand with a generic term).

We also know that a Facebook deal has been approved, as announced today by Microsoft as part of the Bing-Twitter news. But the Facebook data hasn’t yet been implemented on Bing. Will there be a “Bing Facebook Search” service to come? Or is Bing Twitter likely to turn into “Bing Social Search” that combines Twitter and Facebook data?

Microsoft told me they don’t have anything to say on the Facebook front yet. Personally, I’m expecting we will see a Bing Social Search that combines Twitter and Facebook together, if only because today’s blog post from Bing about the new Twitter service is signed by the “Bing Social Search Team.”

Tweets Versus Links

Real time search engines are confusing creatures. Do they show actual tweets and microblogged content that people are putting out? Links that are being shared through microblog services like Twitter and Facebook? Both?

Our What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players article from earlier this year take a long look at this issue, and I recommend reading it to understand Bing Twitter Search better.

Bing is trying to do both. When you do a search, you’ll get tweets at the top of the page and shared links at the bottom:

How Fresh Are Your Tweets?

Let’s focus first on the tweets that Bing brings back and shows at the top of the page. Below, a look for a search on kanye west, a popular topic at the moment over rumors he’s died:

Notice the times. When I snapped this, the latest tweet was 1 minute old, followed by three that were 2 minutes old. But over at Twitter Search:

The top three results are only half a minute old. So, Bing’s missing a lot of tweets. But it’s supposed to have the Twitter “firehose” of everything that happens on Twitter virtually as it happens, so what’s up?

Demand & Ranking

Microsoft’s Sean Suchter, General Manager, Search Technology Center, says his company takes the blame. Right now, all tweets are indeed coming into Bing in real time. But then Bing is trying to remove duplicates, filter out adult content and do some other processing. That’s resulting in the delay, but Bing hopes to improve this going forward. It’s a beta, he reminded — and fair enough, especially a beta in its first day.

In the main results, tweets are sorted by date. The most recent tweet shows at the top, and new tweets push that down. That’s how Twitter Search also ranks things, and it’s a spam magnet (see Twitter’s Real Time Spam Problem).

We’ll see if Microsoft changes this order going forward. As said, they do some filtering beyond what Twitter already does. But when you “drill down” into search results, that’s where they hope the results are even more filtered by quality, popularity & usefulness. Let’s look.

Time Ranking Vs. Best Match Ranking

Notice the “more tweets” link below:

This link appears below the “tweet” search results for any search you do on Bing Twitter Search. When you click on it, you can drill further into the results (in contrast, if you were to keep scrolling down on your original search page, you’d see the “Shared Links” section.

Drilling into the results shows you more tweets, sorted by time:

See the arrow? It’s pointing at the two options you have, “Most recent” sort or “Best match” sort. By default, Most Recent is selected.

Suchter said that when you drill into results, filtering goes way up. Bing may try to drop up to 90% of retweets, for example, so that there’s variety in the results rather than everyone saying the same thing over and over.

Then there’s “Best Match” sorting:

Potentially, this should be awesome. But there are problems, as the arrows will highlight. First, though, the ideal world. There are plenty of times when you want “authoritative” tweets, and that’s what Bing promises here:

On that page, you can change the ordering to “Best Match.” Here we arrange Tweets differently. If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower. For example, I saw a Tweet from ABC News ranked pretty high in the Best Match mode during the “boy in the balloon” fiasco. By the way, you won’t see any of your tweets if you protected or deleted them, and tweets don’t last more than 7 days in our index.

In particular, Suchter said that each tweet’s ranking is influenced by things such as:

• Estimated authority of the person tweeting (such as number of followers they have, how often they’re retweeted)
• Number of retweets a tweet has
• Freshness of the tweet

Now in the search above, what would be authoritative in a Kanye West search? To me, a tweet that makes it clear it’s not true, so we don’t get a repeat of the Jeff Goldblum death rumor (he’s still not dead, either). And look at the screenshot. The first tweet I point at shows the Miami Herald saying he’s not dead. Good job!

Not so fast. Actually, the first tweet is someone retweeting the Miami Herald saying that. Someone with 1/4 of the followers of the Miami Herald. So why isn’t the Miami Herald being shown?

Suchter said the Miami Herald probably should be up there, and that this is something his team is looking at. It’s a beta, remember?

Now look at the second link. Fox News. OK, we can debate how accurate they are. But it’s a news outlet. Good story about the rumor? Well, no. Actually, it’s Fox News trying to cash in on traffic to currently popular topics on Twitter by writing an article about currently popular topics on Twitter.

Look at the third link. Bing really, really falls down hard here. This is misleading spam, someone trying to cash in on the popularity of the search promising a Kanye “RIP” ringtone, whatever that might be.

Now you were to click on that link, Bit.ly itself would stop you with this scary warning:

Nice that Bit.ly does that — but why didn’t Bing do that for you first? After all, a big part of Bing’s announcement today — which drew applause from the audience listening at the Web 2.0 Summit — was that it would open all shortened URLs (those from bit.ly or other URL shortening services) bit.ly URLs, as you can see in the example below:

That wasn’t happening in the Kanye West search. Suchter put it down to a glitch that his team would be investigating.

Shared Links

Remember I mentioned that when you do a search on Bing, the bottom of the page is devoted to a “Shared Links” section. Here’s a close-up:

The goal here is to show you the hot and popular links that are being tweeted on your search topic. Showing top links isn’t unique. Many any other services do this, as described in my What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players post. However, none of those players, to my knowledge, get the fast “firehose” of data that Twitter provides.

How’s the ranking done? Each link is evaluated according to a variety of factors, such as:

• How recently is the link
• How many people are retweeting it
• What’s the authority of the people who are retweeting

Microsoft is also following the links and indexing the content of the pages. In addition, it also understands the “main” or “real” or “originating” URL even if different URL shorteners are used. Notice below how the same link from ZDnet is associated in a cluster where two different shortened URLs are used to reference it:

Notice also that for any popular URL, you see up to two people who have tweeted it. Which two? Again, accounts that are deemed relevant based on their authority, people who are retweeting them, freshness and other factors.

For any popular URL, you can drill down to learn even more about it — again, something that’s not unique to Bing’s service, but it’s still pretty cool. Click on the “more tweets” link for any URL:

Then you’ll get a full view of tweets related to that URL. By default, these are sorted in time order (I’m using a different drill down example than the screenshot above, but you should get the point. I had to go with a different page because for some reason, sometimes the drilldown doesn’t work on Bing Twitter Search):

However, you can do the “Best Match” resort. In this case, here’s Best Matches for this article you’re reading now:

Notice how the top results is not either the Search Engine Land Twitter account nor my own personal Twitter account. Instead, these are ranked 2, 3 & 4. Why wouldn’t they higher?

Again, factors include followers, how much your retweeted and how recent the tweet is. Notice that my tweets are older than the person who’s top listed.

URL Lookup

Want a warp speed way to find out what people are tweeting about your pages? Just copy and paste your page’s URL into the Bing Twitter Search query box. Your page should be listed in the top links section, and then you can drill down to see recent tweets or best match ones.

Bing Twitter Search Home Page

You don’t have to search to use Bing Twitter Search. When you arrive at the home page, you’ll see a tag cloud of popular topics:

You can click on any of these to drill down into popular topics. About the only downside to this is listing those topics on Twitter Search itself has driven up spam, people who will tweet misleading information about subjects. It’ll be interesting to see if Bing manages to stamp down on the spam within its own search results.

Below the tag cloud, you’ll see hot links being shared across Bing overall:

The red arrow in the screenshot above points to how each subject has a heading, and by clicking on the heading, you can get even more info on that topic.

Finally, when you do a search, by default new tweets will flow in automatically into the tweets section of results. You can also use the pause button to stop this:

For more, see Bing’s post about the launch and related discussion on Techmeme here.

AllThingsD has reported that Microsoft will announce a deal with Twitter today to gather its real time data. We’re able to confirm that from a source as well and provide some additional details.

The deal will make Bing the first major search engine to have access to Twitter’s “Firehose” of tweets. It’s not exclusive, however. Google potentially could still do a deal, to.

We’re told that:

• The deal will be announced today shortly after Microsoft’s Qi Lu takes the stage at the Web 2.0 conference at 11:30 Pacific Time today. Some sessions are being broadcast live here, and Lu’s might be one of them.
• There will be a standalone Twitter search service offered at Bing, with some ranking technology other than sort by date involved, and that shortened URLs will be expanded. That service should go live today.
• There will be some integration within the regular Bing service itself

Discussions to gather data from Facebook are also continuing, and there’s a chance a deal might be concluded for announcement today.

We’ll update as we learn more. To understand the importance of Twitter and Facebook data to the major search engines, see my What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players. It covers what Bing currently does with limited Twitter data it’s able to get now.

See related discussion at Techmeme.

Postscript: Heard back from Google:

At Google we strive to connect people to all the world’s information and this includes social and real-time information. We’re currently exploring new ways to further integrate this type of information beyond what we already offer with services such as Search, News, Profiles, Reader.

Reading between the lines there, my understanding is Google is still talking with Twitter and Facebook itself. Google’s Sergey Brin told me two weeks ago that he seemed positive some type of deal would be struck with the companies. Given the Twitter deal is non-exclusive, I’d expect that’s still likely the case.

Postscript 2: Microsoft has now confirmed the deal on stage at Web 2.0, as expected above. It has also confirmed a deal with Facebook. Financial terms aren’t being disclosed. Microsoft is not saying if there’s a particular time frame associated with it. Will the date influence Bing’s regular results, Lu was asked.

Postscript 3: From the Twitter blog, news on the deal and a strong sense that Google will get a deal eventually:

We hope more working relationships with organizations in the search business will mean even more variety for users.

See our updated posts:

• Live Today: Bing’s Twitter Search Engine
• Live Blog: Qi Lu Speaking At Web 2.0
• Google & Twitter Have A Deal, Too

When it comes to search, Facebook’s focus was, is, and apparently always will be on the idea of “friend search.” That’s the main conclusion you draw from reading paidContent’s interview with Akhil Wable, the man leading Facebook’s search product.

Friend search is becoming a core part of the social web experience, and it’s an area where other companies are trying to compete with Facebook on some levels. Yahoo just announced an update to Yahoo Profiles with a focus on sharing and finding out what friends are doing. Google Reader has friend sharing features built in. And “friend search” is what FriendFeed is all about, which is certainly why Facebook bought FriendFeed last month.

In the paidContent interview, Wable says Facebook’s focus on friend search won’t change:

“When we look at where Facebook provides value it really is understanding the user, the things they care about, things that they are connected to. That, sort of, will always be the core focus.”

Late last year, Facebook further integrated web search when it allowed users to search the web via Live Search (now Bing) without leaving Facebook. Wable pretty much sidesteps the question about how many have Facebook users have tried the Bing web search (”In general, I would say they get used”), and downplays the presence of Bing results on Facebook as little more than filler.

“I think Bing is not front and center. (It) sort of adds value to what search is already doing. It definitely isn’t core. It definitely isn’t the most popular thing that people are clicking on but it’s definitely adding enough value that we actually put it in the product.”

Wable says he doesn’t see Twitter search or Google as competitors at this point because of Facebook’s focus on friend search.

Speaking of Google, though, DailyFinance ran an article Thursday that asks if Facebook might “kill Google” in the advertising space. The article shares anecdotal stories from small advertisers who’ve found more success with Facebook ads than Google AdWords. But it’s a David vs. Goliath question at this point, and if Google were concerned, they could quite easily share exponentially more stories of small advertisers who found the opposite to be true — more success with AdWords than Facebook.

Does today’s speech from President Barack Obama to school children across the United States need any more controversy? Having listened to it, I personally can’t see many parents objecting. But I could see one tech company not happy: Microsoft. Competitors like Google got called out as “good” things to aspire to while a Microsoft’s Xbox was something he suggested should be turned off.

From his prepared remarks, which should be pretty close to the exact speech he delivered: Microsoft gets the bad news early:

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

Turn that Xbox off! OK, perhaps some of the time. And you could argue that Microsoft is getting some Obama love here. It’s an Xbox he’s mentioning, not a Sony PlayStation or a Nintendo Wii.

Still, Microsoft probably would have preferred to have the love that Apple got later on in the speech:

Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine.

No one’s putting the Xbox along with accomplishments like saving lives!

There’s more love for Google, as well as Twitter and Facebook:

Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

Google, Facebook and Twitter alongside landing on the moon, fighting a world war or civil rights. Communication changes, true — though made possible by underlying infrastructure changes, that of the internet, not to mention the telephone system itself.

I also found it remarkable that of six brand mentions in total that I spotted (did I miss more?), five of those were tech oriented (the remaining one was the Harry Potter books).

See also related discussion on Techmeme.

Postscript: Video of Obama’s speech is now up on YouTube:

The Bing Search blog announced a new test they are running which allows you to share your search results with your friends via Twitter, Facebook, email or other methods. The only way to see this test is to become a fan of the Bing Facebook page and then, if you are lucky, Bing might send you an invite to preview this feature.

If you are not a fan of Facebook, don’t worry, I’ll show you how it works. On certain queries that generate “instant answers,” such as sport scores, flight times, weather results, movie listings and so on – Bing will add a line under the result to allow you to share the results with your friends. Here is a picture of the current layout:

I don’t believe I have ever seen Google, Yahoo or Ask.com try this method of sharing search results before. I kind of like it, if it is an opt in feature, of course. Bing is calling this the “Bing and Ping” search results feature.

No discussion of social media’s effect on organic search results is complete without considering Facebook’s well-laid play for “search” domination, in a closed-loop-members-only end run around Google’s public algorithmic crawl.

With 250 million users, the recent purchase of friendFeed and newly offered ability to search at macro and/or granular users’ network levels, Facebook’s internal community-search platform may well threaten other search models by sheer magnitude of participation and users’ trust of their friends, extended networks and themed groups.

Why SEO for Facebook is now crucial

Whereas most SEOs think “Google” and other mainstream engines when gauging the effect social media profiles on organic SERPs, Facebook is quickly becoming a massive walled-garden parallel organic internet. Think Facebook internal search results won’t matter? Think again and start “optimizing.”

According to its publicly released statistics, Facebook claims 120 million of its registered members log in at least once each day. Every month friends share 1 billion photographs and 10 million videos. In any given week users post over a billion content blocks, news stories, links and blog posts. There are over 45 million active user groups. Little-to-none of Facebook’s is activity is indexed by Google and other mainstream engines. It’s easy to see why Facebook’s members-only organic search results deserve attention!

At the root of this new consideration is the reality that Facebook is now allowing users to search the last 30 days of their news feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by friends and the Facebook pages of which they’re fans.

Check out my personal Facebook search results (from among friends) for “Indian food.”  I see my friend Reem ate Indian food  for lunch.

If other users have chosen to make their content available to everyone, you also will be able to search for their status updates, links and notes, regardless of whether or not you are friends. Search results will continue to include people’s profiles as well as pertinent Facebook Pages, groups and applications. Also note the cool ability to filter your personal  “search visibility” by various Facebook internal channels: links, status updates, wall posts and notes.

There are  commercial results in my Facebook wide “everyone” SERPs from a restaurant promoting their participation in the San Francisco Food Festival.

Here’s another commercially-tinted result, R2 Indian Buffet. The listing was was sourced from R2’s Facebook Indian Buffet page.

Look at these 2 results for the search “seafood in New York.” Chef Andrew Hunter’s listing comes as a result of his using the words “seafood & New York” in the most current wall post.

Next, Andrea Cohn’s profile comes up #2 for “seafood in New York.  She’s promoting the Bongo seafood lounges, in West Village and Chelsea, with a wall post of  a martiniboys.com listing. Facebook is showing the title tag of the Bongo post Andrea bookmarked.

One other important observation: Bing is the official Facebook “web results” search engine. With the recent Microsoft/Yahoo deal Bing will be also be powering Yahoo. Consider the branding and traffic implications of Bing powering Facebook behind the garden wall, especially when one click actually takes users to Bing.com.

Ten Facebook SEO tips

1. Search results continue to include people’s profiles as well as pertinent Facebook pages, groups and applications. Therefore what you’ve done to date still works. The gravity of Facebook groups, which some thought lame, will increase as Facebook internal search is adopted.

2. Facebook gives us some clues regarding its algorithmic ranking factors.  Read it and understand. Stay up to speed on changes in the Facebook blog, as they will certainly occur.  Hopefully as Facebook grows they’ll make a search quality team ambassador available like Google’s Matt Cutts and Bing’s Sasi Parthasarathy. As people learn to spam these results, Facebook will react and SEOs will want more information.

3. In addition to wall posts, think SEO in tendering status updates, links and notes. You never know who will find it, searching for whatever.

4. Wall-post external content like blog posts and news should be optimized for important keywords, especially the content’s title tag.  If possible post content where the call to action and/or contact information is actually in the title tag. This gets your pitch to the search results as opposed to requiring a second click through to a profile page.

5. If you want your promotional data indexed in the wider Facebook, outside of your friends, make sure you select “everyone” in privacy settings > search. Though it’s possible users might not be happy if they were aware, existing accounts default to “everyone,” understanding this is a cool inside tip for early success.

When “everyone” is selected, others may see your data regardless of whether or not you are friends.  Reciprocally, users should uncheck if they want to exclude their profile from wider Facebook SERPs.   It would not be surprising if users protest when folks start to discover that all of a sudden some of their personal sharing is visible to everyone.

7. Remember that it’s not only wider (non-friends) Facebook search that matters. Your friends, friends of friends, networks and networks of friends are likely to trust you a bit more since you’re “local.”  It’s fascinating to extrapolate the implications of a “trusted local personal search network.” As a user or searcher, be aware of how Facebook search privacy settings function.

8. Seek advice from other tools Facebook gives us regarding users common social graphs. Lexicon, which is about to get deeper, and the Facebook paid search platform offer cool insight regarding what’s hot.

9. Contribute continually.  A good portion of the physical search results are comprised of social graph points generated within the last 30 days.

10. Be there or be square! Stay tuned for attributes, in and out of Facebook, may factor in the search results as Facebook evolves.

A crucial new channel for search marketers to master

All of this has potentially massive repercussions for how marketers view Facebook chatter.  By really digging deep into how Facebook is searching internal content, you’ll be tapping into the next level of the web’s development, uncovering a gold mine of data about what people are talking about, what they like and dislike, and how they are influencing the opinions of others. This is clearly an important search frontier.

Dig around. Learn the specifics in form and functionality of Facebook’s newly enhanced organic search results. In order to “optimize” for Facebook internal search, it’s important to learn precisely what areas of participation to focus on for the most influence. Facebook gives us a bit of ranking criteria information regarding how the engine is wired. Facebook groups will matter more than before, as a result of the new search algorithm, if & when Facebook internal search achieves wider adoption.

As always in social media marketing, leveraging friends’ (and your own) recommendations, without being a spammer, is sticky business.  Follow the timeless axioms of social media participation. give more than you take by contributing unselfish & recurrent content recommendations for others to consume. Be holistic in how you promote your own content and (as always) think in terms of supporting the community first.

Facebook said this afternoon that it’s “beginning the roll out of Facebook Search to all users,” which was previously being selectively tested. I’m unable to see it yet. But the Facebook blog explains:

You now will be able to search the last 30 days of your News Feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you’re a fan. If people have chosen to make their content available to everyone, you also will be able to search for their status updates, links and notes, regardless of whether or not you are friends. Search results will continue to include people’s profiles as well as relevant Facebook Pages, groups and applications.

Search at Facebook has been pretty lousy and so this represents a big opportunity for the site to become more useful and engaging — more than it already is, that is. There doesn’t appear to be any larger integration of internal and external Web search (Microsoft). The latter is still an unrealized opportunity for both Facebook and Microsoft.

For those who don’t have the new search yet, see our What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players article, which explains it more. That article also looks at FriendFeed, which Facebook announced it was buying today.

Previously rejected by Twitter, Facebook has bought FriendFeed, instead. The official release is on Facebook, and FriendFeed’s Bret Taylor has posted about it on the FriendFeed blog.

Though Facebook has long been competing with MySpace for social networking supremacy, it’s been eclipsed in some ways by the immediacy of Twitter and, to a lesser degree, FriendFeed. While Facebook has become more Twitter-like recently, it’s still a different animal altogether.

In buying FriendFeed, Facebook gets a very similar set of tools as if it had bought Twitter (some would say a better set of tools). FriendFeed recently launched its own real-time search tool that looks remarkably like the search experience on Twitter (and also see What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players).

All 12 FriendFed employees will join Facebook now, and the four FriendFeed founders — all ex-Googlers — will take “senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams,” the release says. Financial terms of the deal were not released.

There’s more discussion on Techmeme.

(Note: Headline changed after one person pointed out a possibly offensive meaning in the original that was unintended.)