How do you translate rich emotional data; namely, the level of consumer engagement in the things they are passionate about, to help find the right brand partner? Is it possible to quantify this reciprocal liking into a simple percentile score? Redmond’s Colligent suggests you check your Q score – with MeQ™! MeQ™, short for Mutual Engagement [...]
We interrupt this August clickstream for an important announcement. Your Seattle neighborhood’s (pick one): “community center / playground / apartment building / commuter lot / bakery / convenience store” has just been “vandalized / burgled / graffitied / set ablaze” and was the scene of an emergency that was phoned in while you were “at [...]
While most of the eyeballs in the Web world these days are being diverted to the video chats, hangouts and huddles created by Google Plus and Facebook, or the portable pixels of mobile advertising via smartphone and tablet, the traditional delivery of display advertising in graphical form, a staple of the Yahoo! ad system, appears to [...]
The game is afoot in Seattle this week as the video and mobile gaming spheres reverberate with the news that Electronic Arts will purchase hometown PopCap, the creative force behind Plants vs. Zombies, Peggle, and Bejeweled, in exchange for $650 million in cash, $100 million in EA stock, and up to $550 million on performance based bonuses over the [...]
What are your choices for broadband Internet access in Washington state? Cable? DSL? Fiber? Wireless? A new website from the Washington State Broadband Office has been designed to help you locate those answers. Click on broadband.wa.gov or wabroadbandmapping.org — and find your location on the interactive map. The interactive map reveals, among many things, what [...]
How fast can you build a Website? How fast could you do it with just a mobile phone? That’s the beauty of Zapd, which sees fast and easy Website creation as the solution for creating an online presence for practically any purpose: classified ads, vacation properties, or special events like weddings or birthday parties. The [...]
Friendly, local hometown deals are lighting up the local Seattle landscape like a Cascade sunrise, courtesy of the city’s premier South Lake Union anchor tenant and Etailing jungle beast, Amazon.com. The local brands and Northwest flavors are as homespun as the Emerald City and its three neighboring suburbs in the deal zone: Tacoma, Bellevue and [...]
When it comes to making the right choices about where to shop, what to buy, who to deal with, and how much to pay, from airfare to health care, music to movies, real estate to restaurants, and now in the vortex of consumer electronics, your desktop cursor has always pointed you in the right direction. [...]
If you were one of the thousands of Seattleites who were part of the festivities at Qwest Field on Saturday to experience the transcendent U2 360 concert, including Commander Mark E. Kelly, husband of Gabrielle Giffords, who composed his special greeting during his 16-day mission with the Space Shuttle Endeavour crew, your attendance was duly noted. Among [...]
The world of search marketing, and its most elite software developers, tool makers, pundits and practitioners, descend on the Bell Harbor International Conference Center this week for the fifth annual edition of the Search Marketing Expo Advanced symposium, a sold-out, standing room only event with an expo hall of exhibitors and special workshop sessions that [...]
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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]