I have been writing a bit about the invasion of social capabilities into all online tools. Fairly soon this will no longer be news. I remember in 2004 bloggers were excited every time some big shot started blogging. Now that is a yawer. Now we are reading about how the Weather Channel is going social and how LinkedIn value dramatically increased after it introduced social features. Of course social business is the big headline in enterprise tools but social search appears to be still in its infancy
Now the MIT Technology Review writes about: With New Look, Bing Gets More Organized, Social. They announce that Bing will transform its interface a layout in three separate panes featuring traditional text results, results from specific information sources and services, and results related to your social-network friends. Sounds a little like Tweetdeck meets search.
I have heard from some Bing executives a while back that they were going to make the search tool more social and they seem to have pulled it off. Now we will see how it affects Google's 66.4 percent lead over Bing’s 15.3 percent of U.S. search queries in March, according to comScore.
The MIT articles also notes that the new capabilities will go beyond the new interface. For example, Bing will now suggest friends who might be knowledgeable about a specific topic by considering their listed "likes" on Facebook. A feed will also let you see and respond to your friends' Facebook updates and questions. And users will be able to ask their Facebook friends questions via Bing.
There is the rule proposed by Andy McAfee and others that the new tool needs to be ten times better than the current one people use. We will see if all this social stuff meets the 10x rule.
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