Social Media Teams With Search Engines

Bing and Facebook have announced a partnership to augment normal search engine results with social media data; the intention is to make search results more personalized and relevant by by combining individual preferences with information pulled from Facebook “friends”. From the consumer side, this technology should be very useful in deciding which movie to see or where to go for dinner.

However, the risks of the Bing/Facebook search and recommendation engine run straight to the heart of growing privacy concerns. Facebook has a record of sharing user information without permission: the Wall Street Journal recently reported that of the top 10 Facebook apps, all 10 had moved user data over to ad companies, and some were even capturing and monetizing information about the friends of those users. This means that combining Bing’s search capability with friend activity could potentially make the social media site even more invasive than ever.

The Facebook experience may be instructive for retailers; as retailers acquire and use customer data with greater frequency, the pressure from third parties to help monetize that data in new ways will increase as well. What’s your take on all of this? Does the addition of friend activity to search via Bing add incremental value to the user experience, or have Facebook and Bing really gone too far? Give us your thoughts!

“Google Me” Poised to Take Down Facebook?

The unprecedented success of Facebook in the social media space has seen plenty of would-be competitors fall by the wayside, most notable Myspace. It now appears that the California-based “nerdopolis” known as Google is preparing to challenge the social media icon for market share, and many analysts are expecting them to continue acquiring bite sized tech companies leading up to the launch of their platform, “Google Me”. The most recent of these buyouts occurred last week with Ångströ, which Google purchased largely for their social media integration capabilities and super-focused search engine functionality. If Google expects to compete with Facebook, one major area for them to potentially make headway is with privacy issues/policies – unfortunately this is something that Google has already struggled with in their Buzz and Latitude offerings.
With privacy advocates now more and more concerned over the recent release of Facebook’s “Places”, a location based service meant to connect users with friends and brands, Google appears to have an opening and may be able to attract users with the right mix of functionality and confidentiality. Some major strikes against Facebook in the privacy arena have been the complexity of its privacy agreement and settings, sharing data with 3rd parties (most notably advertisers) without explicit user consent, the difficulty of deleting a user profile and several high-profile hacking instances, Turkish and otherwise. Clearly Google has the scale necessary to compete and make substantial gains in the social media space, even against an established giant like Facebook; whether or not they’re able to actually pull it off with “Google Me” will hinge on their ability to execute where the incumbent has shown signs of weakness and leverage their own substantial, existing user base.

Personal Preferences: Who Owns Your Browsing History?

Bynamite is a start-up company out of San Francisco, and they’re in the business of managing something very personal to all of us; our browsing histories. As Google, Yahoo and Facebook, among others, continue to find ways to monetize information about the things you’re interested in, a debate has emerged over who these revenues should actually belong to. We consumers deserve some form of payment when information about our personal preferences is bought and sold! Or do we? After all, it’s your data…isn’t it? Give us your thoughts!