I always thought the point of social networking was to keep in touch with people that you care to keep in touch with, hence the ideas of "following" people on twitter and "befriending" people on facebook. You do not see what's going on in the lives of people you aren't connected to, and this is obviously how it is meant to be. This begs the question as to why live status and tweets need to be searchable with a separate search engine. As has been said before me, if I "bing" George Clooney, I want information on George Clooney, not someone's grammatically incorrect 140-character opinion on him.
This is another dangerous example of conglomeration. I talked about this in my blog about google a while back - when a brand stands for too many things, it doesn't really stand at all. Bing is not a strong brand as is, associating it with stronger, much different brands can hurt its livelihood and may even effect Microsoft.
Will Google's market share be hurt? Probably not. But this is probably moreso because Google will continue to be innovative and will have something to counter this new aspect of Bing soon enough. Either that, or searchable real-time statuses will be as useless as they seem and Google won't even have to counter. Regardless, this seems like a half-baked scheme whose benefits probably won't be realized.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
A lot of people also use Facebook to find old friends they have lost contact with over the years. I think that being able to do a web search for someone and then their facebook comments come up could be helpful to someone who is looking to get back in contact with someone. So I don't think it's completely far-fetched.
ReplyDeleteI agree facebook and twitter to me is to follow or friend people you have lost touch with and that you know. Less so in twitter where you follow people who are usually celebrities or just say interesting things, but you may not know them. I think bing would have a greater impact on twitter for that reason but as for facebook I think thats a bad idea.
ReplyDeleteI agree that social networking should continue to be a more personal networking like you stated.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that google's market share won't be touched this...and that they will probably develop a more intuitive way to enter the social networking scene.
You make a good point about the strength of the brand. If Bing collaborates with twitter and facebook, its brand name would kind of be lost and won't really be credited as much.
ReplyDelete