Twitter Search has become the definitive real time social search engine since it was launched by Twitter and despite attempts by Google to create a more real time search function, it is still the best way to find out who is talking about what right now.

Facebook search, as Ben Parr at Mashable notes, is not the most impressive of tools and is long overdue an overhaul. The new search function lets you search what is being said about a certain keyword in the news feeds of your friends, pages that you’re a fan of and any news feed that has been made public by the owner.

Although Facebook search will be resticted to people you’re friends with and public facebook profiles, it looks like it could begin to rival Twitter Search as the top real time search tool.

Facebook search could also be an invaluable search tool for brands wanting to monitor what is being said about them amongst their fans. Although, there will be no way for them to see conversation amongst people that are not fans; the people who are most likely to be saying negative things.

Facebook will be expanding the search feature to more people over the coming weeks.

Twitter appear to finally be doing some interesting stuff with their search application. Twitter search was recently integrated into the home pages of all Twitter users. This meant that rather than having to go to search.twitter.com, users could search Twitter right from their home page.

The latest news is that Twitter are working on crawling the links that people post in their tweets. Cnet Webware reported yesterday that Twitter search, which in the past only indexed the text of tweets, will begin to index the pages that people are linking to on Twitter.

This is a big development as it will begin to make Twitter Search a more complete search engine and more on par with Google. In the past, Twitter search was fantastic to searching what people are talking about, but it was not particularly great for finding useful content; however, Twitter Search may have the one up on Google as their search engine is real time. So you will be finding content that people are talking about then and there.

Twitter are also planning on taking into account reputation ranking in Twitter Search. This will mean that when you search for a particularly talked about trend in Twitter, Cnet point out, “Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank search results in part based on that”.

This will be an interesting addition. Currently Twitter search just shows results based by time, and nothing else. When reputation comes into it, arguably you will get more relevant results.

Twitter have not said how they will rank reputation though. It may be something similar to Twitter Grader; basing reputation on number of followers and number of friends, as well as amount of retweets and conversation frequency.

It is unclear whether results from people with a higher reputation will give us more relevant results. Take the Schiphol disaster as an example. We could end up just seeing what Stephen Fry said about something, and that might not be as relevant as seeing results from people that were actually at Schiphol whitnessing the event. Hopefully Twitter will take things like this into account.

What does this mean? Well it provides a number of new opportunities for what can be done with your data in Facebook. Firstly, it has spawned the creation of a new Facebook desktop app which is a similar application to TweetDeck or Twhirl and lets you recieve and post Facebook updates from your desktop. Lovely.

However, one particular developer has been a bit more innovative with what can now be done with your data. Teck Chia has built an application called Newsfeed RSS. What this application does is convert your Facebook newsfeed into an RSS feed – this can then be subscribed to in an RSS reader. By anyone.

ReadWriteWeb point out a number of things that could be done with this RSS feed; put it into a reader; filter it with Yahoo Pipes to display updates from people you care about and, and it’s a big and: publish it to a Twitter account.

Basically, you could create a Twitter account, pump that Newsfeed RSS feed into it, and hey presto: all your friends’ updates, which they think are only going to their immediate closed network, are now being published on the web. Now obviously, I don’t recommend you do this without telling all your contacts, but I’m sure you can see this raises a few privacy and trust issues.

The key here, is that no one would know that this could be happening. People think Facebook is a closed network, but it no longer is. It just goes to show you should be so very careful about what you are posting up on Facebook, and assume that anyone could be reading it.

Twitter, along with many other social media sites are leading the way in delivering the latest news, the thousands of users creating an army of journalist, many updating live from the source using a mobile phone. Now many newspapers are realising they simply can’t compete, and the NYTimes is calling for photos and eye witness accounts of what is happening.

More than just headlines and latest reports, some of the Tweets were very personal such as one message which said; “Emergency’ can some one check if there bomb blast of some shootout in Oberoi hotel of anywhere in Mumbai? I am at Inox inside”[sic]. Another Tweet encouraged people to give blood, letting users know which hospitals had a shortage.

While Twitter has been given a lot of credit for providing live news on the event, many other web 2.0 sites played a huge part as well. Flickr, for example, had many photos uploaded taken live from the scene, giving users a real eye-witness account into what was actually happening, while a Google map was used to update people on where the attacks had occurred. Facebook, on the other hand was used by citizens in the main attack area to update friends and family that they were ok via the status feed.

One blog which deserves a mention is mumbaihelp which gave information on hospitals and emergency relief within the Bombay area, as well as informing others where they could donate blood.

While, Twitter has been very useful as a news source throughout the conflict, it is important to remember that live Tweets are not verified and it is important to think about what the consequences of Tweeting certain information could mean.