The Bing-Twitter Deal
By ArchieIndian | Technology25 Oct 2009
Since Microsoft Corp. took on Google in its own forte, it has been making efforts to break grounds in conventional search, through its search engine Bing. First, we saw Bing Visual Search and now, at the recently concluded Web 2.0 summit, MS took the fight to a whole new level – striking a double punch through the deals it has made with Social Networking giants Twitter and Facebook. While you can take a sneak-peak at Bing’s Twitter integration, the Facebook deal will materialize much later.
MS [and for that matter Google too] have made their respective failed attempts to buy out both Twitter and Facebook. While both Twitter and Facebook decided to thrive on their own then, they didn’t mind the cash inflow this time around by making available the vast real time updates they have at their disposal. Even as Twitter CEO Evans Williams humorously downplayed questions regarding this deal (a day earlier at the Web 2.0 summit), Microsoft’s online services group President Qi Lu went on to explain the deal, a deal that MS likes to call “Bing Wave 2″. Lu said the deal with their other prospective partner, Facebook, will come in at a later point. Excerpts from his interview here and a conversation with ‘O Reilly here.
The official Bing-Twitter Integration is up and live at http://www.bing.com/twitter, for the US only (so change your country preference to US to check it out). It has a tag cloud showing the hottest topics on twitter (similar to Twitter’s trending topics) and also sample tweets on each of them.When we actually make a particular query, we get the tweets in two categories ‘Most recent’ and ‘Best match’. The Tweets corresponding to the search tag are supposedly updated in real time (but when we checked it out, didn’t quite find it to be so!!). This is just a basic setup live and should get more compact/trendy and feature laden with time. A snapshot :
The deal in itself is huge (and we are not talking in just financial terms here, infact Qi Lu passed the question when asked about the Financial terms of the deal), taking ‘Search’ on to the real time corridors.The deal gives MS, the access to full (public) Twitter data feed. This, for sure, is a formidable blow to its arch-rival Google. Twitter too has been looking at options recently for some revenue generation. This deal (and the upcoming one with Google) should suffice for some time now. The other options (read ads) is a scary one in itself.!! If the deal with Twitter is big, that with Facebook is going to be bigger, what with the 45 million status updates per day from 30 million unique visitors.
While all this does sound great, the question to be asked is : “Isnt this at some point the invasion of user privacy?“. The question holds less of a significance with respect to Twitter (considering that its user’s tweets are more in the public domain), but gets pretty significant in the context of Facebook (whose users want to share those updates only amongst their friends). News has it that Facebook is going to provide its users with options in this regard. Wonder how this entire deal looks in the light of Twitter’s user friendly TOS (Terms of Service) that says – users very much own their Tweets. So what if MS starts Archiving these tweet streams. Facebook have anyways a non-friendly TOS (as per which, Facebook can use/modify/publish your status updates and that too even after you terminate your account!!). Probably the Bing-Facebook integration will further fuel the issue. So are the users ready to let these giants invade their privacy (read status updates) for the sake of a perfect real time search? Readers’ opinion solicited.
Related posts:
- Bing – Visual Search
- Google Wave: is sure to create Waves!!!
- Lissn – Twitter and Google Wave loosely combined and simplified
- Social Media Presence of Indian Telecom Majors- Part 2- Twitter Presence
- Consumer and Influencer engagement through Social Media
Tags: Bing, Facebook, google, google search, Microsoft, MS, real time search, search, search-engine, Twitter, twitter-deal, visual search, web 2.0
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Prasaad K S, Vikash Kumar. Vikash Kumar said: RT @microreviewsorg What does it mean for #Google – the Bing-Twitter Deal http://bit.ly/4amXsf #bing #twitter [...]
@Vikash What does this deal mean for social media? Is SEO going to change completely with even Google striking a deal with twitter to get status updates? Will this not mean a lot more bots on twitter? Will this not mean, the same URL being tweeted a zillion times to get it up on the BING and GOOGLE results?
SEO parameters do need to be redefined.. Pls chech out the Qu Li interview..he throws some light on the matter :
"We do de-duping, to get rid of repeats. Then we focus on the quality of the results, based on relevancy. One way to to see how many people follow a user. We also look for context, maybe they have a link in the tweet that is relevant. And if a tweet is being retweeted a lot, we loot at that…We also filter out spam and adult items that shouldn’t be in results….And with Bit.ly URLs we will show you the domain of where you’re going to land, so you aren’t tricked."
So I am pretty assured bots/duplicacy/tweet ranks and SEO in general will be a more thought out process when Google joins ranks.. Btw, its still in a very nascent stage..time will bring clarity with it..
It's funny to see the mighty Goliaths like Microsoft and Google kneel infront of the Twitter-phonemona…The one having Twitter by their side will be the winner of the Search Engine battle it seems…
As always a very well researched post by Vikas…
@Ankur : Actually this advantage of MS (the deal with twitter and FB) will be short lived.. Google is right on its way to making similar deals with both of them.. And once that happens the real show will begin.. It will again come down to which of the two powerhouses Google/MS are able to integrate these status updates better and in the best crawlable way..
Microsoft products bing, windows 7, office 2010 all are getting good reviews. MS slowly but surely is looking to come of age.
Google get ur innovative team going at full throttle – MS is coming after u big time
@Vikash I know that Google-Twitter deal is on but Google-FB..I donot think that is going to happen. Microsoft has a stake in FB man.. So as of now it's advantage Bing. Also I quite like Bing, the underdog which took on the evil but worthy search technology leader Google…
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by viksontweet: RT @microreviewsorg What does it mean for #Google – the Bing-Twitter Deal http://bit.ly/4amXsf #bing #twitter…
This is an interesting deal to say the least. I think every SEO expert just took their headphones off and backed away from the keyboard for a few minutes, scratched their head, went back to work wondering how big of a shift is about to happen…interesting times to be in the marketing business.
@David : Yes, the SEO parameters will be changing big time and SEO gurus would be scratching their heads as to how to perfect their SEO solutions in lieu of this development. Marketing business in general and online marketing in particular will be taking a turn for sure. Readers have already raised questions on the aspects of bots flooding in (to twist the SEO) but I guess Bing (and later Google) will have this as the first point on their mind.
David, since you are in Marketing full time and we at Microreviews deal in Social Media Marketing, we'd like to get in touch.
You can mail us at : vikashbitmesra@gmail.com
-Team Microreviews
[...] as Google calls is getting hotter by the day in the web space. First Microsoft announced the Bing-Twitter-Facebook Integration deal. In a matter of days Google followed to launch ‘social search by tying up with twitter and other [...]
Very nice site!
i am a user of Microsofts BING search engine and it is as good as google for static webpage search. for searching blogs, i think google gives more relevant search results compared bing.