We were right about Bing + Facebook!

Today, Bing announced it has become a Facebook Instant Personalization partner, and is going to start using like data to change the way you comprehend your search results on Bing.

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This is an incredibly smart move that I’ve wanted them to take for ages. In Social Data for Search Giants (a blog post I wrote here 1 year ago), I wrote the following:

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Facebook could offer a Facebook Connect implementation specifically for search engines that allowed them to check URLs against a database of friend’s posted links.  This would allow the search engine to enhance relevancy. Think of it like this (forgive the quick/ugly mockup):  http://skitch.com/tylerwillis/bswcr/presentation2

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Now, I’m not going to sue Zuck and try to get on the Winklevoss retirement track. But, I think it’s fun that the actual implementation wasn’t too far off from my prediction. Here’s the examples back to back:

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———– FWIW:

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in the spirit of social design, I did a quick review. What did I miss from the final implementation?

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• I forgot Faces. In 09, I assumed that privacy concerns would keep personalization information limited to text. Swing and a miss — we now know that people want faces. They want to see who did what. Your social network is not made of equals, identity and context are very important for social interactions.

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• Places not Products. I thought they would initially roll this functionality out for places – instead they are rolling it out for products. In hindsight this is obvious because product pages have way more likes and are far easier to identify and organize sanely.

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• Too much info. I assumed Facebook would move to display comment and other meta data around posted links. It doesn’t look like this will be in rev 1.

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