BoomTown was intrigued when Mind-Your-Own Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter, penned a blog post yesterday about the microblogging service changing its prompting question.

Now, above the little Twitter box, it reads, “What’s Happening?” and not the original tweet query, “What are you doing?”

While the blogosphere covered this as if it were a moment of monumental meaning, most were ignorant that the true beacon of innovative What’s-Happeningness does not reside in Silicon Valley.

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Microsoft digital head Qi Lu took to the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit conference this morning, where he confirmed a “strategic” deal with Facebook and Twitter to integrate real-time information into Microsoft’s Bing search service.

BoomTown broke the news of those deals earlier today.

Top Microsoft exec Yusuf Mehdi did a demo of the new tweet-powered search for Twitter; the Facebook integration is to come later.

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In a stunning one-two punch, Microsoft will announce separate nonexclusive deals today with both Facebook and Twitter to integrate their real-time feeds of status updates into the Bing search service.

According to sources, Microsoft digital head Qi Lu will announce the deal onstage in a few hours at the Web 2.0 Summit.

BoomTown reported earlier today that the Microsoft data-mining deal with Twitter was poised to be announced.

The first-mover deal by Microsoft, needless to say, is a solid blow to Google, which has also been talking with both companies about a similar arrangement, because–for the first time–data will be available on Bing that are not available on the search giant.

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According to sources, Microsoft is close to striking a nonexclusive data-mining deal with Twitter to integrate the microblogging service’s full feed into the results of its Bing search service.

News of the deal, which was still being worked on by engineers and execs at both the software giant and the start-up as late as yesterday, could even come as early as today at the Web 2.0 Summit conference in San Francisco.

But sources close to the situation caution that the deal could still run into a snag and was not yet complete, although it seems more likely than not that a deal will soon be struck with Microsoft first and then Google, which is the other company Twitter has also been talking to.

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Is there gold in them thar tweets?

Maybe so, because–according to sources familiar with the situation–Twitter is in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google separately about striking data-mining deals, in which the companies would license a full feed from the microblogging service that could then be integrated into the results of their competing search engines.

Sources said a number of scenarios are being discussed to compensate Twitter for its huge and potentially valuable trove of real-time and content-sharing information, generated from the data stream of billions of tweets from its 54 million monthly users.

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Unlike the gripping back and forth of the fight over Yahoogle last year, the approval process for the search and online advertising partnership of Microsoft and Yahoo is chugging along slowly but surely as the Justice Department has deepened its investigation by reaching out to a broad range of publishers, advertisers, public interest groups and rivals for comment recently.

But, so far, there is still no significant external challenge to the MicroHoo deal, even from Google, the likeliest company to try to scuttle or, at the very least, slow down the deal.

In other words: Zzzzzzzzzzz…

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Although it is not a particular surprise, because Microsoft and Yahoo execs had previously said they expected as much, the Justice Department lobbed in a “second request” for information about the search and online advertising partnership the pair struck earlier this summer.

A Microsoft spokesman confirmed the request to BoomTown.

“As expected Microsoft and Yahoo received an additional request about the agreement, as we said when this agreement was announced,” said Microsoft’s Jack Evans. “We anticipated this deal would be closely reviewed and we continue to be hopeful that it will be approved by early 2010.”

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It looks like the local market is heating up even more, with MSNBC.com announcing the acquisition of Chicago-based EveryBlock.

Sources said MSNBC.com–a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal–paid several million dollars for the “hyper-local” information site, which is up and running in 15 cities, including New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and Boston.

In June, Time Warner online unit AOL paid about $10 million to buy Patch Media, a platform that does deeply localized coverage of communities on a range of topics.

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It did not start out too well for AOL CEO and Chairman Tim Armstrong, with a poll on the screen showing most of the attendees in the ballroom at Fortune Brainstorm Tech voting that the Time Warner online unit was either out of juice or irrelevant.

Armstrong did not break any news in the interview with Fortune’s lively interviewer, David Kirkpatrick, relying more on projecting an I’m-in-charge-here attitude and saying confident things like “a challenge is also an opportunity.”

In general, Armstrong tried to be upbeat about the prospects for AOL, which has for too long been the Web’s sad sack of an Internet company.

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For all the noisy hubbub over should-we-or-shouldn’t-we-publish confidential documents hacked from password-protected accounts of Twitter employees, as well as a Twitter spouse, it is actually pretty simple.

Stolen equals stolen.

But, because this is a “hot” issue and it concerns an even hotter Web 2.0 company–Holy traffic-gooser, Batman!–the debate will surely go on and on, even as the stolen information inevitably leaks its way out.

Still, let’s not pretend what it is and is not.

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In what is quite possibly the most spot-on comment about Twitter that BoomTown has heard thus far, Harvard University Professor Jonathan Zittrain said about its use by Iranians protesting the election results there:

“It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world. The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.”

In other words, Twitter is so simplistic and silly that it is a perfect digital tool to overthrow a government–which kind of makes the trendy microblogging service the Forrest Gump of international relations.

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Apparently, if you want to think about the growth of the Huffington Post as a culinary dish, perhaps today’s replacement of CEO Betsy Morgan with longtime online media powerhouse Eric Hippeau might appear under the Emeril Lagasse cooking cliché: Let’s kick it up a notch!

Both co-founders of the online media site, Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, said as much in interviews I did with them–as well as Hippeau–this afternoon.

“The deal is that we simply have been growing so fast that we needed more firepower to accelerate in expanding the site and monetizing it,” said Huffington, who is also editor-in-chief of the news site.

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We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s Part 2 of 4 of an interview I did with Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg.

The social-networking site has had quite a year as the hottest and most hyped on the Web 2.0 landscape. With fast growth and still-questionable monetization power, where Facebook is going will be a journey plenty will be paying attention to.

In this video, Zuckerberg talks even more about sharing information, explains why he wants to stay CEO, discusses mistakes like Beacon and successes like Facebook’s open platform, and defends widgets. Meanwhile, Sandberg talks about why she came to Facebook from Google, compares widget popularity to Elvis fans and talks about where ad spending is going online (think virtual ice cream cones).

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We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s Part 1 of 4 of an interview I did with Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg.

The social-networking site has had quite a year, as the hottest and most hyped of the Web 2.0 landscape. With fast growth and still-questionable monetization power, where Facebook is going will be a journey plenty will be paying attention to.

In this video, I get a Princess Phone from Zuckerberg and Sandberg and apologize to Zuckerberg about calling him “toddler CEO.” Then Zuckerberg talks about sharing information, learning to develop by hacking on AOL, his time at Harvard University, and Sandberg talks about her time at Harvard, in the Clinton administration and at Google.

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We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s Part 3 of 3 of an interview I did with Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer.

In this video, Glocer talks about how to avoid the fate of the music industry, the troubled economy, his favorite gadgets, new ways to deliver information on a variety of devices, and also takes questions from the audience about machine-trading and possible new acquisitions.

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