Bing Adds Twitter Stream to News and Facebook Integration to Entertainment

Bing's essentially adding ways to stay updated as well as share content.

Padmini Harchandrai|Mar 28, 2011, 10:10:35 IST

A little while ago, Microsoft's search engine, Bing, unveiled Bing Social which allowed you to see a real time tweet stream to find out what's going on in the world. Now they're adding this tweet stream to their news page. So for instance, if you search for "Japan Earthquake", you will not only get results for news sources covering the event, but also a stream of real time tweets that mention the disaster. The idea here is that in these events, especially seen in the Middle East, citizen journalists provide relatively compelling coverage, compared to news outlets. This allows readers to stay in tune with what's happening on the ground as well as the bigger picture.

Note the tweet stream on the RHS

Bing has also released a way to share your entertainment consumption directly to Facebook through Bing. Let's say you're looking up a movie on Bing. Along with a 'trailers' and 'reviews' tab, there's also an 'overview' tab which has a "What's On Your Mind" Facebook sharing feature on the page itself. Bing's basically integrated Facebook into its entertainment pages to make sharing a lot easier and quicker. Once that share goes onto Facebook, friends can like and comment on the activity.

Facebook share box under the movie description

These two features are only available in the United States right now, but should be rolling out to the rest of the world shortly.

By Padmini Harchandrai

Paddy does not, we repeat, definitely does NOT belong in the category of Mac-head (yeh right!). She does get excited by her iPhone and her iMac and her iPod Nano and her Macbook and Bali's iPad and her future iHouse (patent pending). Ok, so maybe her head is a little bit forbidden fruit shaped. She likes shooting video (iPhone 4 camera zindabad!) and editing montages (Final Cut Pro zindabad!), whether the scene calls for it or no. In her spare time, she's either kicking it on stage with KB the keyboard or kicking butt at Taekwondo.