Biz Stone has blogged about Twitter’s plans to integrate real-time search into the central Twitter service, saying that a small random subset of people will see Search and Trends in their signed-in home pages, looking something like this:

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch says:

“By making search more central, Twitter will capture even more of those what’s-happening-right-now searches. I wonder how many Twitter users right now even realize that you can search it. The search feature is not easy to find (it is a link at the bottom of the page). This is an obvious move. It will open up new ways to explore Twitter for users and train them how to do real-time searches on a regular basis.”

Adam Ostrow at Mashable says the power of the feature is clear:

“It’s not only a real-time sentiment index and chat room-like feature for different topics, but also an amazing way to address one of new user’s big problems – finding people to follow, beyond the “suggested users” that was recently added. Once search goes live to everyone, the value of Twitter should become immediately more obvious, and could also help keep the company on its incredible growth trajectory.”

Elsewhere on the web:

Beth Kanter has a lengthy post based on a conversation with Twestival founder Amanda Rose about what non-profit ventures can learn from Twestival 09.

Robin Goad at Hitwise blogs about the most searched-for personalities in the UK towards the end of 2008; quite unsurprisingly, Martin Lewis of MoneySavingExpert.com is #1.

Shiv Singh at Razorfish blogs his thoughts on the worrisome aspects of social media for brand managers and marketers.