Researching people on Twitter is very limited – users have to settle for reading a 160 character bio, some recent tweets, and one link to another site. Twitter has proven to be an excellent medium for discovering new contacts, but often the information there isn’t enough. So, do you turn to Google and wade through an ocean of results? Look up their LinkedIn bio, blog, company website, or…?

With qwerly, one can simply type in a Twitter username, and the site aggregates all related social profiles tied to the account. It will even include recent activity for the profiles, including recent tweets and Plancast posts.

There are similar services for aggregating social profile info about users (Gist, Rapportive), but these services are for people you are already in contact with (mostly via email). With Qwerly, you just need to visit their site and type in a Twitter username.

What tools do you use to discover people on Twitter? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.

Search is where it’s at on Facebook. Moving even further away from display ads, Microsoft has announced it will no longer be selling them on the Facebook site at all. The move was accompanied by the announcement that Microsoft will also be using Bing as the default for web search on Facebook on a global scale, pushing beyond the current U.S. restrictions outlined by their existing partnership.

Microsoft has said in a blog post that the decision to stop selling display ads on Facebook was a mutual decision, and that Microsoft would like to focus on the aspects of Facebook advertising that make sense. As Microsoft has already shared its plans to expand its current Bing offering on Facebook, it appars as though search may have a lot to do with the monetization of Facebook and related advertising options.

Right now Microsoft Bing is still rolling out new features on a regular basis, seeking additional adoption from web users and mobile users alike. Upon launch, Bing was already rather inclusive as far as features go, with a multimedia approach to search that also leveraged the social web more directly than Google. Incorporating Twitter and Facebook into their long term search plans indicates Microsoft’s hopes around the social web as they pertain to its own investment in Facebook.

Bing’s search results on Facebook, however, are pretty dismal. Going along with Facebook’s simple format for displaying information, it’s difficult to even tell that it’s a Bing search. Unlike the vibrancy of Bing’s main search portal, Bing results on Facebook are merely a series of links. That’s archaic compared to most search engine’s increasing ability to better contextualize search data. This is particularly notable as far as Bing is concerned, as its move towards contextual search results is one way in which Microsoft could be looking to out-do Google.

This process of contextualizing search data has been an ideal attached to the potential of social networking platforms, with Facebook leading the race. As Facebook continues to open up its platform towards more default public sharing, Microsoft’s Bing is leveraging that publicly-shared information to provide more relative search results in some cases. Tying search into more aspects of our actual Facebook experience can be another way in which an improved Bing presence on the social network could be used to Microsoft’s advantage.

The old tactic of becoming a default tool across as many partnering services as possible is one that Microsoft is now able to better employ on web-related platforms, particularly Facebook. With the social network claiming over 375 million users now, accessing those users on such a large scale could be a major benefit for Microsoft Bing.

The new wave of crowd-sourced information is upon us, with news emerging of Aol’s relatively new but still underutilized service Owl. Deemed Aol’s answer to Wikipedia, this human-powered collection of user-generated and premium content is planned to use towards the creation of an online resource for searchers. Pulling from Aol’s content management system Seed, it appears as though Aol’s current efforts are moving towards the utilization of user-generated information in order to better contextualize the web.

This particular aspiration is shared by several other companies, from Google to Microsoft. Real time efforts in particular have put the project of improving the contextualization of shared web content front and center, though there is a relatively long history of services pushing towards a more semantic web for some time now.

Making articles and photos more readily searchable is a massive undertaking, and it’s one which most major (and smaller) companies have attempted in the past. Some of these efforts were halted by an inability to do this on a large scale, or a slow uptake from users.

Recent changes in social networks and content management systems have made for easier access to shared information, including APIs that can tap into the content we post on sites like Twitter and Facebook. A lessened reliance on users to contribute directly to such a network mans that a resurgence of such content aggregation is now more feasible.

Aol is particularly interested in growing the various aspects of its company as it is now once again independent from Time Warner. The past few years have been an exercise of focus and determination as Aol has been working on re-branding itself and releasing more products for its customers. Shifting its focus from products that directly monetize consumers to something more ad-revenue based has been a massive project for Aol considering its size. The renewed focus on crowd-sourced initiatives could possibly make Aol more nimble in some regards, giving it an opportunity to rise to prominence once again.

Leapfish, the multimedia search engine, has gone real time. It’s a move several search engines are making, especially those that had vested interests in social media to begin with. The increasing adoption of real time tactics for socially-driven search engines means that tools like Leapfish are hoping to bring he power of social networking to the search scene, powering immediate gratification for our information needs.

Some highlights of Leapfish’s updated site aside from the new real time search include a personalized home page, enabling users to create their own dashboard. This acts as a startpage of sorts, aggregating popular news and basic media from various sites like YouTube and Twitter. Pull multiple news feeds across blogs and various applications to shape this media search engine to suit your needs.

Leapfish is looking to work both the recommendation and search ends, providing sharing tools directly from its site so you can both search and share content you find interesting. By burning both ends of the candle in this way, Leapfish is hoping to become an invaluable hub for information and sharing. The potential for creating a recommendation engine around this could be high, and I think it’s interesting that Leapfish is taking the search engine approach to address this potential.

The reason I find this interesting is because most companies hat provide similar services do so in a more directly social manner. Sites like FriendFeed essentially do the same thing as Leapfish, just with a different interface and more reliance on socially generated submissions. With all the automation going around with media sharing, however, the content that ends up being shared and discovered on either Leapfish or FriendFeed will already have a lot in common. The difference is that FriendFeed will have to work its way more towards a search engine, and Leapfish will have to work its way more towards a socially-driven site.

This cross-directional dance we’re seeing with various startups will likely continue for a while, as real time search becomes more and more prevelant for both individual and enterprise use. The world of search will eventually need to do more with the compiling of data, answering our questions instead of merely pointing us in the right direction. But for now, time is one of the most important ways in which we can layer context into our search results.

For Leapfish, it has faced some obstacles upon its initial launch, particularly with sales, a necessary aspect of any web-based startup reliant on advertising revenue. The aggregate search engine is smart to reiterate its potential by adding real time search to its feature set. As a result, however, Leapfish already faces competition from the likes of Collecta and Bing. I think Leapfish is headed in the right direction, as real time search could hold a lot of promise for the companies that execute it well.

From PR 2.0

Over the years, Twitter search was plagued by an unbelievable flaw. Deleted tweets remained in Twitter’s search index and thus, would appear in the search results regardless of the conscious act of manually removing the tweets from your personal stream. Believe it or not, this problem remained constant much to the dismay of many power users. To my pleasant surprise, Twitter has finally rectified this problem and has officially removed deleted tweets from its index.

Now that Google and Bing are channeling Twitter search results, it’s widely suspected that Twitter had no choice but to remedy this enduring problem. Imagine if your deleted tweets ranked among the top results in Google or Bing? Obviously privacy is a primary concern and this is a step in the right direction. However, privacy on the social Web is an oxymoron of sorts. Once a Tweet is published for example, it is indexed by many other third-party services, networks and applications. And, even if you delete a Tweet, it still may reside somewhere else. For example, if you stream your Tweets to Facebook and Tumblr, obviously you’d have to delete the updates across multiple platforms. But, the other challenge is that there are several other services that pull tweets where they may also reside once deleted.

Either way, to officially have deleted tweets removed from search results is a welcome update that is way overdue, but valued nonetheless.

Oh, and make sure to check out Collecta for real-time search results…it not only indexes the live twitter feed, but also the social web to reveal activity around keywords as they appear online. (Note: I’m a tech adviser to the team.)

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It’s a big week for Facebook. Yesterday they announced the Friendfeed acquisition and today they’re upgrading their search capabilities.

When I teach personal branding on Facebook, I always warned people to make a note of important things when they see them – that the information will disappear into the stream as fast as it got there. Now that is no more. Facebook has improved search to cover all those great (and not-so-great) things in your stream.

According to their blog post,

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.

So now you can find that site someone shared with you and you were going to look at later. The search results filter things on the left-hand side, which is a familiar format for Facebook users. You can view results by friends, posts, applications, and more. You can even search the Web and Facebook will source the results from bing.

This definitely makes Facebook more useful for me – if only because I do put off acting on my friends’ suggestions and this makes things more searchable. Will I change my privacy settings to make my content available to everyone on Facebook? Probably not. I’ll stick to my friends in my walled garden and be perfectly content.

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Cheers!

Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

Google’s Chrome initiatives have been a major topic of interest given Google’s long term goals to incorporate as many of its products into intertwined, revenue-generating aspects of its company. But what about all the other browser add-ons that have long since known what Google is going after with so much browser integration?

VideoSurf is the latest to create a browser add-on that seeks to add value to what we already experience on the web. The newly released VideoSurf Firefox extension offers videos at a glance, giving you the ability to see what’s behind shortened URL video links, among other things (download it here).

But let’s talk about the shortened URL preview option, considering the buzz that’s been going around today about Tr.im dead-pooling and the concerns it’s brought up regarding the Twitter third party app market. Shortened URLs are among the easiest ways to spread spam and malware around social media sites such as Twitter, giving VideoSurf the attractive feature for seeing what’s behind the shortened URL before clicking on it. If you already have Firefox then you’re able to see the full URL behind a shortened URL, but VideoSurf’s Firefox extension takes things a step further by giving you a video summary complete with the video title and a thumbnail.

Some other highlights of VideoSurf’s new browser add-on include Google and Yahoo search enhancements, giving you additional video results based on your initial query. VideoSurf results pull from Hulu, and Fancast, among others. Hover your mouse over the search results thumbnails and you’ll see a short preview of the video.

This is an interesting search enhancement, given Google’s own video search results, which are often separate from the main search results, as well as Yahoo, which has recently teamed up with Microsoft, adding to some of the multimedia results already present on Microsoft’s latest project, Bing.

But for some added Google search result enhancements, VideoSurf also perks up your YouTube queries as well. Based on searches performed on YouTube, VideoSurf will also give you results from other sites across the web. If you’d like to see full-episode web clips for certain queries, this particular feature is right up your alley.

Admittedly, some browser extensions can be overwhelming and annoying, especially those that act automatically based on something as basic and as frequent as web searches. To curb any hatred towards its new Firefox extension, VideoSurf has made its tool pretty customizable so you can turn it off and on with one click, and pick and choose which features you’d like to use for your personal preferences.

Of course, VideoSurf is pretty niche in its service offerings, and you’re only going to appreciate this tool if you’re a video junkie (I actually do know a few of those). Nevertheless, I tend to appreciate the browser approach towards solving certain problems. VideoSurf has selected some handy features for its new Firefox extension.

Sourced from PR 2.0

When it comes to savvy, proven, and incredibly successful tech investors, Ron Conway is among the top of the list. He has a gift or an uncanny sense of shrewdness, or a fusion of both, to identify real opportunities that will transform into successful exits and also fuel and inspire aggressive innovation in the process.

At the Real-Time Stream event in Redwood City, California organized by TechCrunch, industry pioneers and pundits discussed the state and future of the Real-Time Web also referred to as the “now” Web.

To help entrepreneurs, startups, and industry leaders monetize this tremendous opportunity, Ron Conway offered his vision for the Top 10 ways to profit from Twitter and the real-time Web:

10. Lead generation
9. Coupons
8. Analytics, analyzing the data
7. Enterprise CRM
6. Payments
5. Commerce
4. User-authentication, verifying accounts
3. Syndication of new ads
2. Advertising – Context and display ads
1. Acquiring followers

According to Conway, if you add these up, initial estimates equate to roughly $5 billion. In comparison to traditional monetization in search, Google earns about $20 billion in ads per year.

To view additional pictures from the Real-Time Stream event, please visit my album on Flickr.

To see pictures from the 4th annual TechCrunch August Capital summer party, please visit this album on Flickr.

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Read more from Brian Solis:

Blog: PR 2.0
Book: Putting the Public Back in Public Relations
Social Map: The Conversation Prism