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.

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:

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

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:

———– FWIW:

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

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.

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.

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.