I have to say that even I think that this is very cool, Bing has created a Twitter Bing interface called BingTweets. You can visit it at www.BingTweets.com. I don’t know who’s brainchild this was at Microsoft, but let me tell you Microsoft appears to “get Twitter”.
Personally I thought it was a very cool application and a neat way to check out what is being said online about you or your company. Just put your name in the Bing search box and any tweets that have mentioned you will appear in the Twitter scroller ticker on the right. Even if it is a novelty, it show that something has changed at Microsoft with the introduction on Bing.
In fact Microsoft has done something so big with Bing that their search engine has moved from a 2% market share to now about an 8% market share as of just last week. It doesn’t hurt that Bing has received excellent press from the mainstream professional webmaster world as well as the New York Times, and the fact that it is not Google. But will Bing has the power to supplant Yahoo in market share and really become a contender to threaten Google? If they keep on doing cool things like BingTweet they may.
I for one am watching Bing very carefully. I love the look, the clean interface, and now this new savvy merging of a hot property (Twitter) with a neat application. The millions spent on advertising don’t hurt either. To cement the move I would say to Microsoft now’s the time to move on Yahoo and try to integrate what they have into a mega empire. Then they would have a very real threat to Google, but Microsoft likes to do things slowly and their way, so I am just watching.