Google disables Realtime to add Google+

INTERNET GIANT Google has disabled the Google Realtime feature on its search engine after a Twitter deal expired, and will add Google+ feeds instead.

The Realtime team announced the change on its Twitter feed: "We've temporarily disabled google.com/realtime. We're exploring how to incorporate Google+ into this functionality, so stay tuned."

The reason for the downtime is because a deal with Twitter from October 2009 expired on 2 July, which means Google no longer has access to a "special feed" that allows it to show up to date tweets in its search engine, according to Searchengineland.

Twitter has similar deals with Microsoft and Yahoo, so it's unlikely that it decided to pull the plug on Google, particularly considering its dominance in the market, unless perhaps Twitter felt threatened by Google+.

It appears that Google's focus on its latest social networking project is the main reason why the deal was not renewed with Twitter. It plans to integrate Google+ feeds into Realtime, effectively replacing the information that came from Twitter.

Google will continue to provide Twitter results, providing they are publicly available to its crawlers, but it will no longer be as up to date as before. With tweets largely out of the picture then, people might begin to embrace Google+. Or they might look to Bing to trawl through old tweets.

Realtime also pulls feeds from Buzz, Facebook, Myspace, Quora, Gowolla, Plixi, Me2day, Twitgoo, Twitarmy, Identi.ca, Jaiku and Friendfeed, but Twitter was the primary source of its updates. While both companies said they are open to further collaboration in the future, in the short term Realtime will be somewhat lacking in content, particularly considering that Google+ is still in its infancy. µ