Have you noticed the twitter search engine (http://search.twitter.com/)? It lets you search the latest activity in Twitter and has some advanced search features as well. Have you noticed google's new real-time search option? It let's you search the latest activity from by and large- Twitter. Wait, aren't those the same thing? Now take a look at the social media search tool "Who's Talkin'". It let's search the latest activity across an aggregate of indexes with a high percentage of results from- yes, that's right- twitter. You can be sure there are more social search engines out there and a whole lot more on the way. And you can be sure that if there is one index each one is not going to exclude it will be that of twitter.

Now what is the Twitter-Facebook duo without Facebook?  Well, Facebook also lists user activity in real-time; real-time news feed from friends is at the application's foundation and it has been doing this since 2004, 2 years longer than Twitter which launched in 2006. As far as usage, Facebook users seem to interact more closely with posts than Twitter users interact with tweets. With a face next to each post, the Facebook interface lends itself naturally to more personal interaction. It might be that users feel more comfortable sharing because they are sharing with a closed network of friends rather than the whole world (assuming privacy settings are in place). The language of Twitter, on the other hand, is more stand-offish. You have to learn what replies and retweets are used for along with a less-defined etiquette. There are plenty of conversations in Twitter and although this seems to be catching on, this is not the conventional use of Twitter.

Back to the search element, once those posts clear the first page on Facebook, it seems that users do not go searching for them in the same way that users searching in google tend not to look past several pages. In Facebook's case it could be that a revised search tool would encourage recycling of older posts by making them accessible  At present it, the search box is in the right spot at the top of the page but it is geared towards finding people and pages rather than individual pieces of information. In that sense, Twitter has an advantage for someone wanting to connect to certain topics.

The bottom line is that there is clear new command for internet search- that results tell what is happening at that moment,  i.e. real-time resuls, and all the better if they are from real, established social media sources.