Twitter Inc. is selling the rights to mine its communications hotbed to both Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in dueling deals that underscore the growing importance of being able to show what’s on people’s minds at any given moment. Microsoft will offer another way to probe into the collective mindset of web users by indexing a portion of the personal updates posted on Facebook, an online hangout with more than 300 million active users around the world. That’s about six times the size of Twitter’s global audience, but more Facebook users restrict who can see their updates than Twitter users do; Facebook is only giving Bing access to the updates that its users choose to share with everyone.

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