Webware

Before too long, expect to find anything that anyone puts on the Internet on Google within seconds: with luck, it might even be useful.

Real-time search has come to Google. The company has been hinting at this day for several months, most recently when it announced a deal to access Twitter's "firehose" of data. But it presented its vision for real-time search before the media Monday at the Computer History Museum, claiming to have made a little history on its own.

Over the next few days, Google users will start to notice a box called "Latest results" on the main search results page for a topic that's guaranteed to produce results. Google used "Obama" as its example, and searches for that query place a new box that automatically scrolls through recent "real-time" results associated with that topic from sources like Twitter, FriendFeed, and Google News, as well as new Web pages--such as this story--as they are created.

The concept is hot in the search world: Microsoft's Bing also displays updates from Twitter and various blogs, although those results are not integrated with the main page. And Yahoo has also signed up with a company called OneRiot to throw its hat into the real-time search wars.

What's less clear, however, is how useful this technology will be unless Google and others working on the problem can bring the same degree of relevance and trust to real-time results that it brings to regular search results. Google News can already confuse the casual user who wonders how and why those particular headlines were singled out, so how will relevancy work when a stream of news can knock a particularly authoritative result off your screen in seconds?

"It's a very hard problem. Language understanding is still an unsolved problem," said Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow and one of the key players in developing this product. "Not only do we have to understand what someone is saying, but we have to get to the deeper semantics of what is indeed true. We have to work through many issues. Truth ends up being a rather vague notion."

In a way, this challenge is right up Google's alley. The company is obsessed with speed when it comes to presenting results, agonizing over whether design changes that add tenths of seconds to page-loading times are worth the effort.

And now that seemingly everyone has a blog, a microblog, a social-networking profile, and commenting identity (or 29), new content on the Internet is being generated at an astounding pace. Google used to think it would be able to index all the world's information in about 300 years, but CEO Eric Schmidt told CNET in November that one of Google's greatest challenges in the decades ahead will be staying abreast of the explosion in content enabled by social media.

That's why it's a bit surprising that Google, the world's leading search engine by a wide margin, hasn't necessarily been a leader in this area. Marissa Mayer, vice president of search and user experience at Google, admitted Monday the company could have moved more quickly to organize the vast amount of data produced by services such as Twitter. Anyone who has tried to use Twitter Search knows that real-time search at the moment is like the regular Internet was 10 years ago: a blast of information that's impressive in its scope but overwhelming in its usefulness.

But what Google is trying to do is leapfrog the notion of Twitter as the vanguard of the real-time content explosion. Twitter is undeniably hot at the moment, but new Web pages are generated constantly, especially as traditional media companies move online. One need only to think back to this summer when news reports of Michael Jackson's death sent millions online looking for confirmation, staggering services such as Google and Twitter under that load.

What will Google's real-time search look like the next time somebody famous dies?

(Credit: Google)

Google said it plans to display all kinds of Internet content in its "Latest news" box. Google didn't pay Twitter an undisclosed amount of money for access to its feed for no reason, however; the speed at which real-time content is generated can be harnessed much easier if search providers such as Google have that information pushed to them, rather than having to pull it out of the Web itself.

That raises the question of just how Google will index and rank real-time results. The company needs to develop the real-time equivalent of PageRank, which evaluates Web pages by the number of other pages that are linking to that page. That's something Google "is beginning to experiment with," Mayer said in a question-and-answer session following Google's presentation.

There's definitely some way to do that, but it certainly is not a simple problem. Someone with 15,000 Twitter followers is not necessarily as authoritative in one area as they are in another, and Google will have to figure out some way to evaluate this information to make it truly useful.

Until then, however, news junkies can entertain themselves watching the Latest results section spin with updates on Tiger Woods' latest paramour or the glacial progress of Congress' attempt to pass health-care reform legislation.

In a roughly 10-second period Monday afternoon on Google's Trends page, where it is testing out the real-time service, the feed for "Pearl Harbor Day"--the second most popular trend on the Internet Monday behind the aforementioned Tiger Woods--produced a tweet about a Pearl Harbor Day poem, a news story on people who were in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and a gentleman celebrating Ruby Diner's 27th anniversary with a $2.70 Rubyburger. (He also happened to note in his tweet that it was Pearl Harbor Day.)

Google's new real-time search interface automatically updates search results for hot topics like Tiger Woods, without requiring a browser refresh.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

Google announced Monday the fruits of its earlier deal with Twitter, showing off how it has decided to present real-time Internet content within search results.

Amit Singhal, Google fellow, introduced the real-time section during an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. "We are here today to announce Google real-time search," Singhal said, calling it "Google relevance technology meets the real-time Web."

Google fellow Amit Singhal explains Google's strategy on how to present real-time search results.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Twitter search will show the latest matches for a particular search term, but Google wants to do more than sort results by time. "Relevance is the foundation of this product," Singhal said. "It's relevance, relevance, relevance."

Google will build a section called "latest results" into the regular Google search results page that automatically refreshes Internet content from sources like Twitter. Singhal showed off how a search for "Obama" would bring up tweets, Web pages, and other Internet content related to the president as it was generated. At the Web 2.0 conference in October, Google struck a deal with Twitter to get access to the service's "firehose" of tweets.

Updated 11:13 a.m. PST: Google plans to roll this out over the next several days, and not all users may see the new section immediately, Singhal said. The company also announced partnerships with social-networking companies Facebook and MySpace to display updates from those services.

Updated 11:22 a.m. PST: Real-time search at Google involves more than just social-networking and microblogging services. While Google will get information pushed to it through deals with those companies, it also has improved its crawlers to index and display virtually any Web page as it is generated. Facebook updates posted to public Facebook pages will be indexed, while any MySpace update designated as public will appear in search results.

Updated 11:30 a.m. PST: Google also demonstrated a Google Labs project called "Google Goggles," which allows a smartphone user to take a picture of a given object and send it to Google in hopes of finding out more information about that object. Up until the real-time announcement, mobile search was ruling the day, as Google's Vic Gundotra demonstrated Google Goggles, a new Android application that can show locations of interest surrounding a GPS position, and the ability for Japanese speakers to now use Google's voice search features.

Updated 12:42 p.m. PST: Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search and user experience, said real-time search took Google somewhat by surprise. "I wish we'd had the foresight to see this," she said.

Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search and user experience, speaks at a Google search event Monday.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Indeed, many people position Twitter, not Google, as central to the process of finding out what's going on right now.

There's a challenging balance between assessing what's new about a subject and what's correct, though, but Google believes the real-time search results will actually lead people to the truth faster, Singhal said. How do you assess the latest rumor when it can take time for the truth to emerge?

"Right now a straightforward answer is we emphasize quality and relevance. That often brings the truth out," Singhal said.

And when Google is deciding whether to include your own online musing, you're not just as good as your latest tweet. Just as it uses PageRank and other mechanisms to establish authority of a Web page for search, Google will apply its own measurements to those whose updates appear in real-time results.

Retweets and the number of followers a person has factor into Google's assessment of quality, he said.

Updated 2:02 p.m. PST: The real-time search features is computationally difficult, and Google had to develop more than a dozen technologies to get it working, Singhal said. Not only must it constantly monitor innumerable accounts for the latest updates, it must assess their quality and their relevance to particular queries.

Those who don't yet see the service can get to a version of it using the Google Trends site, which just emerged from beta testing. The "hot topics" area that shows items of high search interest at the moment, and clicking on one of the results shows search results with the scrolling real-time feed of information.

It's all part of getting people what they want, whether they know they want it or not. Mayer shared an example of a person buying a baby stroller.

"If you bought a product, you'd feel really foolish not knowing there was a recall," Mayer said.

And that challenge these days increasingly is a real-time phenomenon.

"In the early days of Google, we used to crawl (the Web for) information every month, then put up new index," a process called the Google dance, Singhal said. "A month was not fast enough. Then we were crawling the Web every few days, then every day, then every few hours. Now we can crawl every few minutes."

"In today's world that's not fast enough," Singhal said. "In this information environment, seconds matter."

New start-up Factery Labs is launching its first service on Tuesday, a technology called FactRank that can tear through Web pages and collect what it calls "facts." These are bits of information from each source page that Factery Labs' algorithm then organizes into an order of importance.

What this means for you is that developers will soon make use of the technology in third-party search engines or on Web pages to very quickly deliver reading summaries. This cuts out most (or all) of the parts you don't care about, while organizing the bits you might. It also manages to do all this in real time.

The FactRank technology was created by Paul Pedersen, who has a good background in search, including gigs at Inktomi, Google, and Powerset. CNET News met with him and co-founder Sean Gaddis (former Skype and eBay'er) on Monday to get a demo of how the technology works.

In a nutshell it goes like this: FactRank goes through each Web page or source (in whatever index it's searching from) finding semantic tip-offs like declarative sentences. It then cross references each of those against one another, surfacing some of the most relevant ones to the top, as well as factoring in the order of how they appeared. What the user then gets is a tidy list of statements, each of which is sourced and given a level of relevancy based on their appearances in all of the indexed source pages combined.

Whew. Got that? Great, here's an example of what it looks like in motion, as seen on a basic search for Sarah Palin on Twitter:

One of the Factery Labs example applications is a search engine that finds facts from Twitter source results.

(Credit: CNET)

Of course, one of the problems with Factery Labs' approach across multiple sources--be it Twitter, or multiple URLs is accuracy; like how can it realize something like The Onion is not the same as the Associated Press?

The short answer is that it can't. Factery Labs can't determine the truth value of what it finds, nor will it ever. "It goes beyond any existing technology. And nobody knows how to do that. I mean, I don't even know how to do that--people don't even know how to do that," Pedersen said. "We are absolutely neutral. We have nothing in the system that has any bias in terms of anything. The only mechanism we maintain is egregious spam, the bad guys."

Along with maintaining a blacklist of these bad sites, FacteryLabs also keeps a list of good sources, or ones that continuously deliver. The more often an author successfully recommends a usable page, the faster they'll accumulate rank among the results.

What you can play with today
As for applying that technology to some consumer products, Factery Labs is launching with a handful of development partners, each of which has already built a tool that makes use of FactRank. The most notable one comes from Sobees which is using the service to add relevancy to Twitter and FriendFeed search results--something that's no small feat.

Users can do a search on Sobees' Silverlight-based Twitter client as usual, but there will now be a FactRank button that can sort through those tweets. It does a quick once-over of all of the results, and will filter the most relevant information to the very top. Included in each of its results is also a shortlist of the facts it finds on every page.

One of the first third-party apps to make use of Factery Labs is Sobees, which is adding its fact finding filters and relevancy tools to Twitter and FriendFeed search.

(Credit: Factery Labs)

Advanced users might find more utility in an updated version of Ultimate Info, an extension for Firefox that does a number of things with on-page data. Starting Tuesday, it will let users select links on a page, each of which gets the fact-finding treatment using FactRank.

In our demo, Gaddis used Ultimate Info on the front page of popular site Drudge Report, highlighting about six or seven URLs that were on the page, then running a FactRank query, which brought in its fact results in just a few seconds. As Pedersen explained, users could run something similar on a long article (or several long articles about the same subject), and FactRank's algorithm would be able to provide a fact summary in short order.

Not launching on Tuesday but where the company expects to see the most development is on mobile devices. "Our analysis shows that mobile devices are a prime target for this technology because the latency produces a lot of resistance in the browse experience," said Pedersen. Instead of a user just getting back a link dump of all the URLs it finds, the FactRank engine will go out, process those results, then deliver users with a summary of the best selection of facts--a move that will save the end user from having to wait for any extra pages to load.

If you want to give some of the third party Factery Labs tools a run, you can find them on the company's implementations section. There you'll also find a test search engine that's running off of Twitter's index.

A look at the newly tweaked Facebook homepage.

(Credit: Facebook)

Facebook members will start to see a new look for their home page "news feeds" on Friday, with the design now featuring a toggle view between a main view, featuring the top stories from their friends list based on their Facebooking habits, and a "live feed" featuring real-time updates from their whole network.

"When the user wakes up in the morning, you go to Facebook and you see (the) news feed," product manager Peter Deng told CNET News. "You see the stuff that you missed, the best of the previous day, to basically catch you up on what your friends have been up to."

This is sort of bringing Facebook's design back to an earlier version. This spring, likely inspired by the hype surrounding Twitter's "stream," Facebook converted its home page news feed into a feed of live updates and relegated "highlights" to a small column on the right side of the page. Plenty of members absolutely hated it, even though Facebook execs have since said that the redesign didn't result in a drop in traffic or usage.

Deng said that the design released Friday, which will be rolling out to the social network's massive user base over the course of the day starting at 10 a.m. PDT, was put together by "responding to a lot of feedback along the way."

Birthday and event alerts are now more prominent, and the news feed also contains stories that stopped appearing when Facebook launched the stream-inspired home page: relationship status news, photos added and tagged, and the like. Brands' fan pages will be worked in there, too, but Deng said Facebook does not allow them to pay for higher placement or prominence. User controls will stay the same: you can opt to see fewer updates from a given person or fan page.

The upcoming redesign was leaked earlier this week via a document distributed to advertisers. But Deng said that the company has "made a few user interface tweaks since then."

Bing's Twitter search starts with a zeitgeist view.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Microsoft is getting into the real-time search business, as we reported earlier Wednesday from the Web 2.0 Summit. It's good to see a mainstream product dive into this stream, as one of the big issues with searching Twitter is that timeliness can swamp relevancy.

Bing has the opportunity to leverage its well-developed search engine chops to address this--not only will public tweets will show up in search results, Bing can rank results based on relevance of the post, the popularity of the writer, and other, more complex factors.

Uncharacteristically for Microsoft, the new search feature went live shortly after the announcement. (We're told the Facebook integration, which was also announced, will be rolled out in the future.) Here's how Twitterized Bing works for users so far:

The main page give a nice overview of trending topics with a search cloud at the top of the page and a list of popular links that are being shared below it. It's a good way to get a sense of the buzz on Twitter at any moment.

Bing's basic Twitter search result page gives you both live tweets (at the top), and shared links (below).

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Search results pages themselves are likewise split into two sections, a live feed at the top with just four tweets, and a list of shared links at the bottom. Results stream in live at the top of the page, but you can pause the influx.

The "Best match" search juggles the display order to put relevant tweets up top, even if they're not the most timely.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

If you click on the link to "see more tweets" on the main result page, you get a full page of tweets on your query, with the interesting option to sort the results by "Best match." If you choose this, Bing takes a stab at ranking results based on their content and possibly other factors, like popularity and online status of the writer.

Timeliness is still a factor in "Best match" results, so you won't get day-old tweets at the top of the list on a hot topic, but adding a relevancy sort on top of that does make the search results more useful. This is especially true for hot topics where tweets feeding into a time-only sort can end up pushing useful and relevant content right off the page.

Bing unpacks short URLs to show you what people are sharing, with no surpise links.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Back on the main result page, there are links related to your search query. These are automatically unpacked from URL shorteners like Bitly. The link results have under them tweets that included a short link to the page, even if different shorteners were used to get there. Bing's Twitter search thus does a good job of pulling commentary together on a topic (a link) even from people who've never communicated with each other on the service.

None of what Bing does with Twitter is startlingly new. Twitter's own search gives great real-time Twitter results. Other engines like Twazzup and Scoopler combine relevancy rankings into their results. And OneRiot does a very good job with shared links. But it is good to see real-time content start to bleed into mainstream search. It could be useful and relevant for everyone.

But this story won't get truly interesting until the real-time feeds, from Twitter and elsewhere, start to infect the mainstream Web search results. When a trending topic or popular shared link on Twitter starts to change the way standard results are ranked, we'll start to have truly real-time search for all content. Twitter will have an impact across the Web, even for people who never use it.

SAN FRANCISCO--By late afternoon on Tuesday, it was getting awfully hot in the conference venue hosting TechCrunch50. Blame it on the body heat, or maybe the scores of laptops humming away.

But the air was sure to get a little hotter when it came time for the "Social Media Streams" category of start-ups to present.

The organizers of TechCrunch50 decided to save the last slot on the final day of the event (you know, right before everybody starts downing booze at the cocktail reception) to showcase new start-ups that deal with Silicon Valley's most hyped niche of the moment: real-time social media. As if Facebook and Twitter couldn't be dominating enough headlines here, there were six start-ups filling up the "stream" category: Threadsy, Lissn, Radiusly, Stribe, Clixtr, and The Whuffie Bank. And the panel of judges was joined by Twitter-savvy rapper Chamillionaire as a surprise guest.

Guess what? The judges, some of whom have been known to drink Silicon Valley hype Kool-Aid as though it were the world's finest wine, didn't think we needed most of these companies.

Oh, boy.

Threadsy's CEO Rob Goldman demos the site.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

Threadsy, whose founders called it "the world's first integrated commnications client," was the best received of the bunch by far. It's a messaging client that aggregates e-mails, Facebook messages, Twitter replies, instant messages, and also "unbound" communications like general tweets and status messages that aren't necessarily geared to you. "We built Threadsy to pull you back together," CEO Rob Goldman told the audience, citing the rapidly growing percentage of Americans who are using more than one messaging client ona regular basis.

It's got a slick interface, can also aggregate automated profiles for your contacts' social-network feeds, and can track Twitter queries in an almost dizzying visual format.

"I think Robert Scoble's head was about to explode," conference organizer Jason Calacanis commented afterward, referring to the Valley mainstay's near-pathological obsession with social feed aggregation.

Scoble's response was remarkably pragmatic.

"I'm just wondering if it has the FriendFeed problem," he said, "which means there's not enough people in the world that care about aggregating all their friends' social networks," but added that he wanted to try it out as soon as possible. A few of the other judges raised questions about how Threadsy will make money, considering inboxes have never been a huge trove for ad dollars. Goldman's answer was a little bit convoluted, which this reporter took to mean that Threadsy hasn't quite figured it out yet.

Up next was Lissn, which appeared to be a combination of a news aggregator, a chat room, and a question-and-answer service. "Lissn starts with a conversation," founder Myke Armstrong said, and then demonstrated the app by posting the question "What would happen if the moon disappeared?" and watched comments and answers roll in. What wasn't really clear was exactly why anyone would use it, what with Twitter, Facebook statuses, and various "conversation" trackers out there already.

"Why would I leave Twitter to join this?" Scoble asked. Harsh words coming from the guy who loves to rave about the next shiny thing that streams words across your laptop screen.

Lissn lets people begin conversations about whatever they want.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

Lissn was followed by Radiusly, which aims to solve scaling and communication problems for companies and brands that want to use microblogging and other social-media tools--many of which aren't terribly customizable. A company can build a Radiusly profile to create a directory of official social-network profiles for its employees, manage them internally, and share media like product images and videos for marketing and customer service purposes.

"I think you guys aimed at the right target but your dart hit the wall and not the target," Scoble said. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman chimed in, "In a rare position I agree with much of what Robert (Scoble) was saying." Ouch.

Next in the lineup was Stribe, which is in the same vein as Meebo's chat toolbar and Google Friend Connect--in other words, something that a smattering of established companies are already trying--adding social-networking features to any site by adding a chunk of code. Stribe can provide metrics pertaining to traffic and engagement, too.

Stribe's social network on a page (click to enlarge).

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

This was another well-designed one, but it was met with more skepticism. "I think one of the hardest things about these networks is actually getting the community to sign up," Facebook exec Mike Schroepfer said on the panel of judges. Dick Costolo gently reminded the Stribe team, "You can do too many things and then it becomes difficult for people to understand what they should use your product for...when you try to do a lot of things at once, it confuses people as to how they should use it and then they just don't use it."

The fifth company in the lineup received a somewhat better reaction. Called Clixtr, it's an iPhone app (and eventually expanding to more handsets) that combines photo-sharing with location awareness, turning the phone into what CEO Fergus Hurley called "the ultimate social camera." Clixtr's hook is event photos: The iPhone app lets you browse pictures from geo-tagged events, send photos instantly to other Clixtr users' phones, and find events near you.

"I think that was awesome," Schroepfer said, but expressed some confusion over exactly how geotagging could sync up to an event. Scoble complimented its sign-up process, but said "I'm not sure it causes enough gameplay, or enough something-else that gets me into this." He wasn't the only one to point out that getting people to use the app would be a challenge. "I would up the level of incentive for participation," Reid Hoffman said, and added that Facebook could easily build location-awareness into the photo feature of its mobile apps.

The last company was what Calacanis called "one of our wild-cards," The Whuffie Bank. Named after the deplorable term preferred by marketing-buzzword-loving social media consultants everywhere (basically, it's slang for social capital, a term coined by science fiction author Cory Doctorow), The Whuffie Bank is a non-profit organization for building a virtual currency around online reputation and influence. You can then use that currency to pay others with "whuffie," like tossing a bribe someone's way to ask them to retweet something you've posted on Twitter.

Note to the Whuffie Bankers: At the very least, please choose a different name for your organization. "Whuffie" sounds like something that would happen in porn movies. And the judges seemed to think that however cool of an idea it might be, it might be best if the currency stays in science fiction.

"The problem with these kinds of currencies is you generally need some kind of banking system to regulate them," Reid Hoffman said. "A lot of cool things...I think conceptually it's going to be extraordinary difficult."

"I want to hear in one line, what do I get?" celebrity judge Chamillionaire asked. "It seem like you've got to do a lot of work for them to raise your reputation...It seems like you can fake it."

And with that, it was happy hour. Or so everyone hoped.

SAN FRANCISCO--Two new companies are launching products designed to get the news to users faster--and from a wider variety of sources. Both are in private beta and not yet available to the general public but were demoed live at the TechCrunch50 conference.

Thoora is a new tool that clusters and aggregates news. It offers people a way to track the latest headlines with a simple ranking tool, ordering incoming stories by "Web reaction." It uses a mix of sources, including Twitter messages, blog posts, and breaking stories from more traditional news outlets. These stories are then filtered and pushed to a front page as well as Thoora's category pages.

One of the things that factors into what ends up on Thoora's front page is real-time chatter. The company tracks how many news-related tweets there have been about that topic in the last hour, as well as "Twitter impact," which is a percentage of density about that topic per 500 messages across all of Twitter over the past hour. It also tracks things like blog comments and linkbacks.

Thoora tracks hot news topics across a variety of chatter networks including blog comments, tweets, and news stories.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

Insttant, on the other hand, cuts out traditional news sources entirely and uses Twitter's public stream instead. It takes these tweets and turns them into an interactive news page that covers people, places, and companies, including a way to track trending topics and user sentiment. All of this goes on a front page, which can be reordered and personalized with topics the user wants to see.

One of the service's more interesting tricks is that it automatically creates profile pages for people containing links and interests based on what they've shared in their tweets. This also happens for trending news topics, which makes for a more in-depth news-reading experience, since you can drill down on any topic and see things like recent mentions, related news and links, and a history of how popular it's been in the past few weeks.

Instant's front page is made up entirely of real-time chatter.

(Credit: Insttant)

Related:
Yahoo's Delicious adds a little Twitter
Full TechCrunch50 coverage

Here's a visual of how status tagging works on Facebook.

(Credit: Facebook)

Facebook on Thursday announced that members can now link to other members' profiles in their status messages by using the @ symbol. The move is clearly inspired by the popularity of Twitter's "@-replies."

This new feature basically means that you can link to the profiles of your friends and other pages on Facebook, and that your friends will be informed when they've been tagged. It's currently rolling out to members' profiles.

Engineer Tom Occhino explains it in a post on the Facebook blog:

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend's name to something you are posting, just include the "@" symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications, and (fan) pages.

The feature will soon expand to third-party services that let you update your Facebook status, presumably including status message aggregators such as TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop.

The development prompted some of my industry competitors to use the word "BREAKING" in their headlines (Really? Can we please leave this term for things on the level of earthquakes, election results, and stampedes at Jonas Brothers concerts?) because it's yet another big sign that Facebook is gradually but aggressively encroaching upon Twitter's territory in its attempt to own the Web's trove of real-time conversation. Twitter is nowhere near the size of Facebook, nor is it anywhere near as feature-rich, but it's enough of a disruption in the space to make Facebook keep trying to get the upper hand.

As you may recall, this back-and-forth has included Facebook's failed attempt to buy Twitter, the "real-time stream" upgrades to the social network's home page, and its acquisition of FriendFeed, a streaming feed aggregator.

On an unrelated note, for brands using Facebook's fan pages, this could result in an interesting analytics product. The company hasn't yet said whether or how the managers of fan pages will be notified that they have been tagged--for a brand with a lot of fans, this could be a lot--and you might imagine that some of the demographics regarding who's talking about them and how often could be packaged into a nice marketing tool.

It'd also be a formidable rival to the "analytics dashboard" that Twitter plans to start selling to businesses later this year, which would be the San Francisco-based company's first concrete revenue model.

Is this Facebook's big assault on Twitter?

(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Baptiste)

Facebook, it appears, was not about to let Google get this week's award for shadowy new projects. On Tuesday night, a number of users--including Mashable blogger Ben Parr--received notifications that they were beta testers for something called "Facebook Lite."

The notifications, as well as the site hosted on the subdomain lite.facebook.com, disappeared within minutes. It seems to have been rolled out prematurely by mistake.

"Last night, the test was temporarily exposed to a larger set of users by mistake," an e-mailed statement from Facebook representative Brandee Barker read. "We have not opened up access to lite.facebook.com to all users at this time. People who are not part of the test and are trying to access 'Lite' will be directed to Facebook.com as usual.

From what it looks like, Facebook Lite is a simpler version of the site and pares down profiles to basic information and a stream of status updates. The easy conclusion is that this would make Facebook's service look a whole lot like Twitter. And given the fact that Facebook had attempted to acquire Twitter, got snubbed, and then acquired the significantly smaller real-time streaming site FriendFeed this week, a Twitter-like service would be rife with implications.

Here's Facebook's official explanation: "We are currently testing a simplified alternative to Facebook.com that loads a specific set of features quickly and efficiently. Similar to the Facebook experience you get on your mobile phones, Facebook 'Lite' is a fast-loading, simplified version of Facebook that enables people to make comments, accept friend requests, write on people's walls, and look at photos and status updates."

Blogger Jason Baptiste managed to get screenshots.

The obvious guess is that this is yet another attempt on Facebook's part to stay abreast of Twitter in the race to own the "real-time streaming Web." There are, potentially, other reasons for launching a simplified site:

• For use on slower connections.

• For stripped-down computers in developing markets, where the 250,000,000-member Facebook wants to make inroads.

• As a more "portable" profile that could potentially tie into Facebook's aim of being all over the Web rather than a destination site.

Facebook hinted that the "developing markets" answer could be an accurate one. "We are currently testing Facebook Lite in countries where we are seeing lots of new users coming to Facebook for the first time and are looking to start off with a more simple experience," the statement from Facebook explained.

Got any guesses, speculation, or conspiracy theories? Comments are welcome.

This post was updated at 7:46 a.m. PT.