Bing - Search Rounding Out

Microsoft grabbing the rights to the real time status updates and tweets for Facebook and Twitter is a huge deal. We talked about Google a couple weeks ago now and how they have the significant market share over all of the competition. The one way that competition could catch up to Google is to offer something important that Google cannot. This is that something. If this new idea takes off, soon more and more users will learn about the idea of bing searching (something I did not previously know). Google should be careful here not to allow this competition to branch out too far and develop too many features that separate it, and maybe even make it better than what Google has to offer. Honestly, I do not totally see the appeal of this from the standpoint of twitter and Facebook. However, they certainly see something that I do not as they have clearly been active on this front. This is a way of spreading their name and an additional feature to what you can do with their sites so in that respect this is a content boost. As far as developing my own websites, this would not greatly affect how I designed my site unless I was designing something for a social networking site. If that was the case, I would have a few concerns and priorities. Those would be that first, security and privatization now become even more important for the individual user. They have to have the types of options that Facebook allows for so that the user can decide who can find them in a search result. Also, you would want to design a specific status or update or recently changeable post section that you could have search-able on a major search engine like Google or Bing. This would allow for your site to spread its influence and be picked up more frequently. In the long run, I do not think that this will significantly affect Google or their market share. However, this is something to look out for in the future. I suspect that Google will counter with a move of their own or at least come up with a similar idea. I don't think they will let Microsoft make a move like this alone. This certainly opens the door for a more competitive market share though down the road.