According to a report by Bloomberg, microblog service Twitter Inc. has reached a deal with Google Inc. that will make it easier for people to find tweets in Google’s search results.

Within the first half of 2015, tweets will become visible in Google search results as soon as they are posted. Rather than the search engine crawling through Twitter’s data, the information is now shared instantly, giving a huge boost to Twitter’s visibility in search results.

News of the deal has caused Twitter’s share prices to jump after a year of shaky performances and tension between some of Twitter’s investors and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.

The new deal is part of Twitter’s long term plan to increase monetization of the non-subscribed users who make up the second-largest demographic for views of individual tweets.

Twitter’s User Base

More easily searched tweets is another step forward in Dick Costolo’s plan for “reducing barriers to consumption and building new apps and services” as outlined in Twitter’s Q3 2014 earning report.

Facebook’s 11th Birthday

Social network giant Facebook Inc. was founded on February 4, 2004, making the company 11 years old as of yesterday. Since its founding, Facebook has grown from a small community of college students to a multi-billion dollar mega-corporation with well over 1 billion users.

Before becoming a company, Facebook began in 2003 as a small project by Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg, who saw the site as a way to connect with friends online.

When it first launched, Time included Facebook in a list of college dating sites, calling the service’s features “Friendsteresque,” and saying, “The site now boasts 58 member colleges, including all of the Ivy League.”

In 2006, Facebook opened to the public, no longer requiring users to have a .edu email address to register, much to the dismay of trendy college students. Within a few short years, Facebook went from a place to plan college parties to a social phenomenon used by the whole family.

Today, Facebook is the largest social media service by far, with over 1.4 billion users. That is roughly one-fifth of the entire world’s population.

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