Of course, the big news of last evening was that Bing and Google are paying for access to Twitter’s firehose.  If you didn’t get it by now, this is the final shred of validation that Twitter needs to convince the world of it’s relevancy.  If only they could keep their servers online consistently, they’d be golden.

Or would they?

Steven Hodson and Sean P. Aune had a good discussion recapping the different aspects of the major move on last night’s CobWEBs podcast.  It is pretty surprising that anything in the world of search gets out ahead of Google, and Steven and Sean tried to iron out exactly how Microsoft got the drop on them (of course, we here at SiliconANGLE have our own theories).

Of all the varying bits of punditry around these deals, one opinion stood out to me as unique. A post by Kevin Burton on his personal blog suggested that this deal has implications far beyond real time search:

What’s interesting here isn’t the deal – what’s interesting is that Google is PAYING for content.

In the past they have refused to pay for content acquisition. Your pay was the traffic that Google sent your way.

Now the NYTimes can come to Google and they have a bit more leverage this time. You’re paying for Twitter content! Hand us over some change for the NYTimes or we’ll cut you off…

It’s an interesting thought, and given the fact that the New York Times is grasping at straws, I don’t doubt they’ll try to use that angle.

Listen to the podcast or download the MP3.

It is my opinion that it gives the NYtimes no leverage of the sort. They could pull the data just as easily without the firehose (from the search API, for instance), they have the ability. They simply prefer to pay for dedicated access rather than have to keep amending APIs or worry about Twitter’s flaky servers interfering with their ability to get data.

As a way around this theory, perhaps the NYtimes should downgrade their servers to randomly show fail whales, and we could be talking here.