On the heels of acquiring FriendFeed, social networking site Facebook announced real-time search features, a move seen to compete directly with Twitter.

The improved search engine will now provide better results, gathering data from those users who have chosen to share their personal information.

It will also include results from users' update streams, something Facebook has left out of search results until now.

While Twitter has shown itself to be a valuable search resource, Facebook's larger community of 250 million users could give it a run for the money when it comes to searching updates.

Then there's the 800 lb search engine in the room, Google, which wrote the book on monetizing search results. Whether this development will see more advertisers looking to Facebook as an ad channel is not yet clear.

Neither they or Twitter have found ways to significantly monetize operations through advertising revenue, something both sites are sensitive to.

As Google has shown, search can solve that problem, but social networking communities are not always open to a barrage of advertising messages.

Reconciling those two things will be the key for both Facebook and Twitter.