People (myself included) spend a good deal of their time sitting looking email… increasingly more on web based mail clients. To add social networking / status updates / microblogging / call-it-what-you-will to the main hub of your online experience is at best, genius, or at worst, blaringly obvious.

Still – that’s the beneft of hindsight…

Search giant Google has just announced on their blog they have reached a deal with Twitter to include Twitter tweets in search results.

Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.

This means a great deal for the online marketing industry in so many ways. “#Hashtags” that were once Twitter trends now have become very real to non Twitter users. What people have previously said about your brand on blogs and forums is now joined by the inexpliccably huge volume of tweets. Twitter’s power is now vastly increased – and so is Google’s, once more.

A very thorough guide can be found here on the Mashable site.

In Google’s own words:

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

If you have 1 hr 20 mins, you can find out much, much more by watching the video below

So sign up to be alerted when it is launched here

You’ll have seen for some searches – predominantly ones involving a town name and a service – that Google Local listings have changed recently.  Google used to display three local results with a link to more, but their research told them that people weren’t sure what those results were.

When Google changed the display to showing ten local results recently,  and significantly changed the way they ‘counted’ local results, some people took a hit. And when your business model relies on more than 90% of your custom coming from Google searches, then things can turn very sour, very quickly.