Bing Indexes Popular Twitter Profiles

By: Erik Medrano [@erikmed]

On July 1^st 2009, Microsoft's Bing community blog announced that a few thousand twitter profiles will be searchable on their latest search engine. The development is crucial to Bing's growth and popularity, as Microsoft beat Google and Yahoo to surfacing twitter profiles in this manner.

Unlike the exclusive contract Apple has with AT&T to monopolize the iPhone, Twitter has opened their API (Application Programing Interface) to the public. Any search engine could have capitalized on this development, making Bing's accomplishments a bit less honored, but the feature works and is indeed the first.

As promised after entering a Bing search field with “@cnnbrk”, Bing delivered the profile of CNN's twitter page at the top of the page, along with CNN's two latest tweet updates and three links taking users to the CNN twitter home page.

“We’re not indexing all of Twitter at this time… just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets.” Microsoft Bing community blog

Impressive, but will this development pay off? In fact, all of Bing's efforts were questionable after the June 5^th launch not to mention the enormous campaign ad produced by agency JWT at a reported cost of over $90 million.

Microsoft's efforts to keep Bing rolling past Google will with out a doubt reward search users. More reason to keep the lovely free market economy we have doing what it's suppose to do: forcing competition and bringing out the best product.

Hope to give others hope

I was on assignment with a nearing deadline and completely wasted my time interviewing a very private J & R Electronics employee. So far in my short career as a journalist I've been fortunate to only discover the outgoing personalities that have no problem confessing their life stories to a complete stranger.

Anxious and frustrated, I made my way toward the exit of the clustered Macy's on 34th and Broadway. "How could some one who sells such cool toys have such a dry story," I thought to myself?

Right in front of the exit I was greeted by two college aged security guards excited to get off and go out for drinks. "Hey man have a good night," the tall friendly security guard built for a D1 footbal position said to me.

I immediatly sparked up a converstation with these guys and the next thing I know Steve, the same one who greeted me, offered to help out with my assignment after he got off work. Five minutes later we walked over to Heartland Brewery on 34th and 5th for a beer.

Steve's hope comes from giving others hope. He claims "It doesn't matter where I go, I wanna make a difference in somebodys life".

With a BS in Criminal Justice, two minors in Psychology and Socialogy but little experience, there isn't much hope for Steve's dreams of becoming a police officer.

When Steve was was 11 or 10 years old he dressed up as a police officer for Halloween. "My friends and I had an expeirence with the cops that showed me that these people really care. The cops came by and asked how we were doing, if everything was going alright or if we needed anything... seeing someone helping a complete stranger told me, these people really want to make a difference".

Still, Steven made it very clear that while having a successful career would be nice, ultimately thats not where his hope comes from.

He will always have hope from helping the world become a better place.