How Twitter Users are Reacting to the Big Bing News
October 23rd, 2009Posted by: J.W. Crump Posted in Social Media Apps, Twitter
Two days ago, Bing announced that they were partnering with both Twitter and Facebook to provide extensive search capabilities for their users. In simple terms, the searches would mine for keywords entered by the user for all the ‘public’ posts on Twitter and Facebook. According to a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project, at least 19% of users post and read status updates. This searching power could prove very useful to those 19% and perhaps cause more users to use status updates.
On October 21st, when the announcement was first made, well over 1500 tweets were linking to various articles about the announcement. Most Twitter users seemed more surprised than anything else. Nearly all of the tweets were a simple headline and URL link. On October 22nd, the number of tweets about Bing and its inclusion of social media search were down to approximately 1350 tweets. As of the writing of this post, October 23rd tweets on the topic are around 250.
In contrast, Google partnered with less and garnered more attention than its competitor. There have been over 1500 tweets every day since the announcement on the topic of Google’s deal with Twitter. Bing may have prepped the user base for Google’s announcement by letting the public know only hours before Google did.
The vast majority of the tweets were simply passing along the information in the form of links and headlines. Approximately 20 tweets were negative, fearing privacy issues, especially with Facebook. Below is one such example.
Social networking users have some reason to be concerned about privacy. After all, Jeremiah Owyang makes a very good point that Facebook is going to have to make more content public in order to compete as these two search engines wage war. Jared Newman expresses eight big concerns about the process; my favorite of which is how Bing and Google will filter out this information in searches for people who don’t care about social media. Most of the time, I probably won’t care what the Twitter-world is saying about the topic I want. I can see that being easily the most frustrating thing to filter out.
Overall, it’s no surprise that these search features would eventually come to light. Twitter user-ship has increased by over 700% in the past year. With more celebs and non-celebs picking up the habit, most ways to search for them were inevitable.
As a sidenote, people forget that Google and Bing aren’t the only search games in town. 18 other useful (and in many cases, MORE useful) search engines are listed in this fantastic article.
