"From your lips to God's ears" was not an expression used much by my family. Maybe that's why I have trouble keeping my mouth shut. But even I know the social networking corollary: "From your fingers to Google's cache."
If you've done a web search for something lately, you may have noticed that posts to the Twitter service are showing up more and more frequently. And you're going to see them a lot more. Google and Microsoft have already bought a direct connection into Twitter's service, giving them "tweets" as they're posted by users.
Now Yahoo is joining them, integrating Twitter into both Yahoo's search engine and into Yahoo user profiles. So no matter what you do, you won't be able to hide from your tweets.
Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, announced the deal on the Twitter corporate blog:
Through this arrangement, people will be able to find relevant tweets in Yahoo! Search as well as other popular products and properties, including the Yahoo! Homepage, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, and more. Yahoo! will also be able to build unique Twitter clients into their properties making it easier for folks to tweet wherever they feel comfortable within the Yahoo! network.
If you use Twitter, you probably already know that everything you "tweet" is public by default. Unless you check off "protect my tweets" under your account settings (at http://twitter.com/settings/account ), everything you post to the service is part of the "public timeline"—the stream of posts by every Twitter user. But those searches used to have to be made within Twitter itself.
Now, search on a Twitter "hash tag" — those words with the pound sign thrown into tweets to show what they're related to— in Google, for example, and you'll get a link to a page with the "latest results" straight from Twitter.
This leads to an interesting option for parents who want to follow their kids' Twitter feed without the outright intrusiveness of being a Twitter "follower". Just plug your kid's Twitter username into your favorite search engine, and you'll be able to follow most of the conversations he or she is involved in without ever even logging into Twitter itself.
