The success of Seattle’s Wetpaint has paralleled, and to a significant extent, propelled the ascendancy of Web 2.0 by answering two of the most interesting and pivotal questions about the Social Web experience. “What features make a Website a social site?” is the first one. By virtue of a Wiki-based foundation that allows collaborative document [...]
Picture the social grid of public opinion on the World Wide Web, the concourse of ideas where daily interchange about your company and your brands is transacted 24/7. Be it in the blogosphere, the Twitterverse, a product review site, a gallery on Flickr, or the many outlets of Googledom, people are typing, texting and commenting on [...]
If the first half of ”year 200o’s” first decade marked the preeminence of search engine and social media marketing on the Web, the second half stood for the era of Search Marketing Analytics, analyzing the payoff from online to offline. By revealing the best insights on Web-based performance, the epoch promises to explain how to bridge [...]
The effervescent, upwardly mobile Ms. Fox has announced that she’s leaving Zillow to become entrepreneur in residence for Seattle-based VC firm Ignition Partners. Vanessa will remain active in the search world, as a new features editor at Search Engine Land. Who’s smiling now? Vanessa Fox seems to be enjoying her new life at Zillow after [...]
“If the Google model is so successful, it seems reasonable to think that everybody should be in the Google business.” — Pixsy CEO Chase Norlin Before founding Pixsy, a media search platform that powers private label image and video search engines for website publishers, Chase Norlin virtually invented YouTube. The year was 1998 and, to [...]
Google’s Vanessa Fox and Amanda Camp are blazing a cyber-trail here in the Emerald Forest that connects Website owners from around the world with the Internet’s leading trailfinder — the Google search engine. The trailhead begins at Google’s Webmaster Central in Kirkland. On a coastal map, it’s a long way between the Bay area of [...]
When Claude Hopkins wrote the classic treatise on Scientific Advertising in 1923 he proclaimed that copywriters must acquire the most detailed knowledge of their clients’ products that is possible. Today, Hopkins would demand that Web writers, designers, producers, media planners, search optimizers and marketing managers apply the same discipline to understand the science of online [...]
Thanks to a priceless gem of a domain name, and crowned by sparkling technology, administrative and software crown jewels, one of the Emerald City’s most popular web properties has become the virtual king of online directory assistance and contact management. By letting your fingers do the clicking at WhitePages.com, you can quickly perform people, business, [...]
The Seattle area’s largest “A round” last year went to the first licensee of a new effort to more ambitiously license Microsoft’s broad base of under-utilized IP. Its name was Inrix. When something as significant as that happens it’s worth taking a closer look. So Seattle24x7′s Dave Chase weighed in with David Kaefer, Director of [...]
This November, for the first time in American history, around 50 million Americans used electronic voting machines similar to ATMs. What separated these automated transactions from the ones we bank on everyday is paper thin, but it’s as important as our US Constitution. When you vote electronically, there is no receipt. Without that accountability, our [...]
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May 14 2012
Google Blinks! Bing Sings, and Slings the Arrows of Social Interface Discontent! Amazon’s Social “Denny Triangle!”
At last week’s Bing Search Summit in San Francisco, Microsoft took the wraps off a brand new Bing featuring a new, right-hand social column (“The Sidebar”) that will eventually include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Quora and LinkedIn integration, as well as people who may know something about your most recent Bing query. The new Bing search even offers a way to ask questions on your favorite social network, directly through Bing. “The search engine has been reinvented!” wrote Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff.
In total, there are three new Bing columns in all:
* Core Search: minus many of the social annotations that Bing has added over the years (that have been relocated).
* Snapshot: providing additional information about a particular search listing, without having to leave Bing
* Sidebar: serving as the new home for social integration with search
“With this update, the competing search philosophies are clearer than ever,” opined Mashable. “Google sees the world as a deep blend of data, people and activities, all of which can be mined simultaneously for a rich and useful experience. Bing sees a more structured world, where social interactions, while extremely helpful, are kept a safe distance from the core results you desire.”
How does Bing build these “Friends Who Might Know” lists? Microsoft execs explained they’re leveraging as much publicly available data as possible from Facebook (for now) and soon Twitter and other networks. Inclusion in the list is not necessarily based on something you posted about the topic.
The sidebar includes people you know through your social networks that have, say, posted a photo about the topic, liked a certain relevant topic or searched for a similar topic in Bing, and people you don’t know, who are, for example, known Topic Experts and Enthusiasts (identified by Bing). All of them could be considered helpful in your quest for knowledge. Conversations revolving around a query topic are viewable through the social pane — you just hover over the activity and a small box will slide out to the left with the original post. You can add comments in any conversation in the activity pane or see the conversation in the slideout.
For example, a search for “Seattle restaurants” might pull up Facebook friends who have “liked” dining establishments in the metro area under a header that reads “Friends Who Might Know.” Bing users can also post comments or queries in the sidebar interface that will automatically be published to their Facebook page (provided they’re signed into Facebook) and could hypothetically flag their Seattle-based friends in posts seeking advice on where to go for dinner.
To see the new pane at work, you have to sign into Facebook and install the Bing App in Facebook. With that done, your social pane will be filled with recent Bing activity that’s also been shared on Facebook. When you enter a search query in the Bing interface on the left, the pane will also display a list of Facebook friends, and topic experts who might be able to assist with your query. Note: The Bing App defaults to sharing your posts with Everyone. If you do a lot of searching, you may want to dial that down a bit.
This deep integration with Facebook isn’t the first time the two have collaborated, and Bing has been adding social recommendations powered by Facebook to its search results for the past year. But it’s a sure sign that Microsoft — which bought a 1.6% stake in Facebook for $240 million in 2007 — will lean on a company it’s heavily invested in to improve on the social-search product Google introduced in January. “Search Plus Your World” pulls up Google+ content deemed relevant to signed-in Google users and has gotten a tepid reception, said Adage. [24x7]
Amazon Advances Its Vision for a Social Campus Compass, Not an “Apple Circle,” but a “Denny Triangle.”
The City of Seattle’s Department of Planning and Development has posted the latest renderings of Amazon’s proposed Denny Triangle campus.
At a public design review board meeting, attendees liked proposed amenities that include outdoor artwork, a playing field, a dog park and space for food trucks.
The venue also incorporates a healthy measure of social engineering into the design. To ensure public open spaces between buildings are both lively and safe, buildings are designed so that people who park their cars in the underground garages will have to walk outside to get from the garage elevators to the elevators in the building lobbies. “That will help ensure a steady flow of people moving through the plazas.”
The project will also be a haven for bicyclists. Each of the three blocks will have a dedicated bike entrance and storage for as many as 400 bikes. That could allow as many as 1,200 Amazon employees to bike to work. [24x7]