LIVE: Microsoft Announces Twitter, Facebook Deals
Posted on October 21, 2009 |
UPDATE: Big news below: Microsoft has signed deals to get full feeds from Twitter and Facebook. Shortly, a dedicated beta site, bing.com/twitter, will have the ability to search full Twitter feeds. Search of Facebook public data will come later. (UPDATE 2: As I figured, Google just announced its own deal with Twitter--though not Facebook.)
Here's the information Microsoft just sent out, with more details below:
Qi Lu, President of Microsoft’s Online Services Division is announcing a new beta feature that enables people to easily search Twitter’s real-time information feed directly in Bing. This new feature helps people make better decisions and more fully understand Twitter conversations by collecting, analyzing and uniquely presenting real-time Twitter content.
More specifically, the new Twitter developments in Bing include:
* A real-time index of the Tweets that match your search queries in results. This feature makes it easier to follow what’s going on by reducing the amount of duplicates, spam, and adult content.
* Giving you the option to rank tweets either by most recent or by “best match,” where we consider a Tweeter’s popularity, interestingness of the tweet, and other indicators of quality and trustworthiness.
* Providing the top links shared on Twitter around your specific search query by showcasing a few of the most relevant tweets.
Additionally, Bing automatically expands those small URLs (like bit.ly) to enable you to understand what people are tweeting about. Instead of showing standard search result captions, we select 2 top tweets to give users a glimpse of the sentiment around the shared link.
You can try out the new Bing Twitter search beta here momentarily or learn more about it at the Bing blog. Please note that this is a U.S. only feature at this time.
Facebook Partnership
As part of his on-stage discussion at the summit, Dr. Lu is also announcing a global partnership with Facebook that will bring public Facebook status updates to Bing search results. The experience will be available at a later date.
Qi Lu, president of Microsoft's Online Services Division, is onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, in an interview with conference co-host Tim O'Reilly. Since joining Microsoft from Yahoo, he has been responsible for trying to turn Microsoft from an also-ran in search to at least a No. 2 to Google--something that likely will happen if Microsoft's search deal with Yahoo passes regulatory muster early next year.
I'll liveblog the highlights as they develop. Here's what he has to say:
