It is expected that at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Microsoft executive Qi Lu will announce that Microsoft has struck a deal with Twitter and Facebook to post their real-time status updates on Microsoft's Bing search engine. This will change the dynamics of search engines, especially the dominance of Google, because never before has a search engine been able to post real-time status updates. Facebook and Twitter are amongst the most popular websites around, and including their live-feeds in the Bing search engine, will add a new dynamic that will give users a new reason to use Bing instead of Google.
Up until recently Facebook has never allowed user profile information to show up in search engines, but now with this new deal they are going to have to change a lot of their privacy settings, as well as user profile settings. With these changes, users can pick what can show up on search engines and what will remain private. It is also speculated that Twitter is looking to make a deal with Google as well. I do not know what impact this will make on Twitter and Facebook because they are entering unchartered territories. I think that this change may increase their popularity because their visibility will be increased, however on the same token I think that Facebook may lose a lot users who do not want to deal with the new privacy settings. This change may affect the way I design websites in the future because if Bing becomes more popular than Google then I will try to get my website to come up earlier in Bing's search engine rather then Google's.
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I really dont think this type of deal will disrupt facebooks popularity at all. Yes, I understand the privacy act will be annoying and many people will look at it and say "what the hell is this?" but then again how many meaningless group invitations do you get? How many meaningless event invitations? People will put the time in to read something like that if they are dedicated to facebook.
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