Big news today about Bing surfacing Twitter and Facebook status updates in http://bing.com search results. Its pretty impressive too. Earlier today I tweeted something about SQL Server:

and sure enough I got the back the following information in the Bing-Twitter search results:

There’s some things to note about this. Firstly, the short URL from my Tweet (http://bit.ly/45bv3t) has been expanded to the full URL to which you would be redirected to (https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=499134). Second, it has recognised following retweets so not only is it finding tweets containing the phrase “sqlserver” but its correctly grouping them together as well which I’m very impressed with. Third, there is a link to more tweets related to the same subject.

All very impressive but I have one question, what about Messenger status updates as well?

If the 40million Facebook daily status updates and god-knows-how-many Twitter status updates are considered valuable then surely the same can be said of the many millions of Messenger status updates that appear every day too, right? We as Windows Live users can already opt to make our Messenger status updates public so there’s nothing stopping this public stuff from appearing in Bing.

Now I must admit this isn’t exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. Tweets from Twitter have MUCH more valuable information in them than Messenger statuses do because Twitter tracks retweets and hash tags and that makes them many many more times more valuable than Messenger statuses (although as I have said before I expect Messenger statuses to move in the direction of Tweets in the upcoming Windows Live Wave 4). Nonetheless, if there is gold in those tweets then there at least has to be some silver linings at the very least in messenger status updates.

Alas I fear us Windows Live users are again going to be frozen out of Microsoft’s own search engine, just as we are from Bing’s forthcoming Bing and Ping feature.  Sad really isn’t it?

@JamieT