Explains TechCrunch:

Under the agreement, Pasadena-based OpenX becomes a preferred partner to publishers for enterprise ad serving solutions and has agreed to promote Microsoft’s Content Ads monetization products and eventual future products to its own roster of web publisher customers.

OpenX said that publishers usings its recently launched OpenX Market and Ad Server products will be able to use MS’s Content Ads, and that the Redmond software giant will refer potential customers to OpenX.

OpenX Market and Ad Server compete with Google’s Ad Manager product. Display is obviously not Google’s bread and butter (though every little bit helps), and it is OpenX’s.

Interestingly, after last year’s acquisitions, OpenX’s advertising services compete not only with Google’s DoubleClick but also Microsoft’s aQuantive. Perhaps Microsoft doesn’t see them as quite enough of a threat to their advertising business—or perhaps they just want market share so badly that they’re willing to foster internal competition.

What do you think? Will OpenX and Microsoft be able to take on Google?

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Those of you in the test group will be able to find content from the people, organizations and public figures that matter to you as soon as they share it on Facebook. . . .

Those of you in the test group will see new layouts for search results that will continue to include people’s profiles, Facebook Pages, groups and applications, and some entirely new Search features. With the test, you will be able to search your News Feed for the most recent status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you’re a fan.

So you can search for not just friends, pages and movie recommendations, but you can also search by topic (a la Twitter). The example in the blog post is the Iranian elections. In addition to pages and people in your personal network, you can also view status updates, links and notes from people who are sharing their profiles with everyone.

Read Write Web points out that this is an interesting move for FB after their last redesign, featuring a “live” news feed—a real-time, self-updating stream of updates from friends and pages. The redesign was so ill-received that Facebook backed off the real-time news stream.

So, RWW asks, is the place for real-time only in the search results?

What do you think? Is this something that will help increase FB’s time on site, or will few people use it (once it rolls out on a wide basis, anyway)?

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