Patricia Belyea is wired for the Web. The ebullient Seattle personality has been a fixture on the Northwest design circuit for more than two decades. In recent years, this savvy communications strategist has resembled a living, breathing hyperlink — instantly connecting people, projects and ideas in and around the Puget Sound graphic arts community. What [...]
The spawning of a new era in search engine technology can be found far upstream of the teeming reservoirs of Google, Yahoo!, Inktomi or Ask.com, just a few miles south of the path being spidered by the new MSNBot along the Northwest’s Burke-Gilman trail. As readers of Google’s recent SEC prospectus took note, “significant competition [...]
Donna Shirley knows the path to Mars. As program manager for the Mars Exploration Program for NASA, Donna was the original leader of the team that built the highly acclaimed Mars Pathfinder rover, landing a vehicle and several instruments on the surface of the Red Planet in 1997. For that historic mission, Donna also helped [...]
As the thirty-something president of The Hacker Group, Spyro Kourtis works hard to differentiate the firm, which under his tenure has grown to be one of the largest direct marketing firms in the West. The decision to aggressively integrate the Internet into the company’s campaigns has turned out to be a strategic windfall. The reasons [...]
“Open Sesame,” the orthodontist beckons, angling for a better look at the inner workings of your teeth and jaw so that he can go to work with the most modern tools and chart the progress being made on improving your smile. A similar strategy is being employed by Frith Maier, the co-founder and CEO of [...]
As author of The Content Management Bible, a gospel on how to organize and publish information in the Internet age, Bob Boiko is something of an information evangelist. Theology doesn’t actually enter into his teaching at the University of Washington Information School (the I-School) where Boiko is assistant chair of the Masters of Science in [...]
The quaint Seattle suburb of Poulsbo, Washington, nestled at the end of a fjord on the Olympic Peninsula’s Liberty Bay, seems like an unusually pastoral setting in which to find a high technology Summit taking place. That the conference would bring together no fewer than three U.S. congressmen along with key operatives and leaders from [...]
As one for whom the term netrepreneur or infopreneuer could have been created, John Jerome has seen the white light of business innovation converge around a great many ideas. Managing a full-spectrum of projects in the Web’s prismatic era, Jerome is now focused on 2004 with renewed, laser-like intensity. These days he is actually using [...]
“To buy or not to buy, that is the e-commerce question.” It is a most ominous and confounding question among Internet shoppers when attempting to fathom the depths of airline ticket pricing. Depending on the time of day you book a flight online, the price of a seat can fluctuate wildly, changing by hundreds, if [...]
What makes Internet eCommerce tick? Scott Fasser knows it all starts with a single click. As the founder and chief digital strategist of digital marketing firm BrandDigital, Scott is an online marketing expert who has honed the fine craft of Web analytics. His journey has allowed him to analyze the life-cycle of the click from [...]
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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]