Temporarily or permanently, Google’s Realtime search isn’t functional at the moment. Shortly after the roll out of Google+, there has been a good amount of changes that happened, and realtime search got hit by the modification downpour. It has caused quite an uproar. Realtime search is developed around real-time data from Twitter, as well as other blogs and social networking services.

The realtime search has disappeared from Google, leading to 404 error page instead. The option is also missing from Google’s left-hand toolbar, as well as the tweet results not anymore visible under recent News query. As tweeted by @GoogleRealtime: “We’ve temporarily disabled google.com/realtime. We’re exploring how to incorporate Google+ into this functionality, so stay tuned,” says a Monday tweet.

However, according to an update by Search Engine Land, the reason behind the disablement of the feature has something to do with the company’s contract with Twitter.

“Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on July 2.

While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that’s publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google.”

They look forward to bringing back the feature, but it won’t rely as much on Twitter data alone. “Our vision is to have google.com/realtime include Google+ information along with other realtime data from a variety of sources,” said Google. Google real-time search first launched as a standalone last year. It makes available to users tools to refine and understand their results.

However, Google+ is still in beta and is far from perfect. There are heaps of additions and alterations that it has to go through to be able to compete head-to-head with Facebook. As one of our writers, Secret CTO, puts it, it “feels like Google Buzz +1 but also like Facebook -1. It’s exciting, but not that exciting.” He also suggested 10 things Google+ can do to become more appealing to users. Moreover, the early adopters of Google+ was greeted with a potential privacy flaw: it’s possible for your friends to re-share your content outside of the circle of influence you originally set. It’s nothing compared to Google’s Buzz’s issues though.

Because of Google+ skyrocketing popularity among curious early adopters, Facebook decided to block a Chrome extension that exports Facebook friends to Google+. Actually, it’s not specifically made for Google+. It has been around since November last year, and allows users to export their Facebook friends to any social media network. Only recently has Facebook made a fuss over it because of Google+.

Google+ is also at work on NFC-enabled devices. The recently-launched Google+ mobile app prompts users to share their NFC-related activities on Google+. This feature was first noticed y software developer Ridzuan Ashim. According to Engadget:

“Software developer Ridzuan Ashim discovered that, when used on an NFC-enabled device, you can read tags and share them through the new social networking service. After scanning, the OS asks you if you want to share the associated text with Google+ or another relevant program. Though the abilities seem somewhat limited for now, we’ll likely see more developer support tossed in as the service matures.”