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Twitter and Bing, Blended

Microsoft’s Bing search engine has teamed up with Federated Media and Twitter to launch BingTweets, which as Microsoft puts it “fuses Bing search results and real time content from Twitter.” You can play with BingTweets at http://bingtweets.com/.

BingTweets presents you with several sets of Twitter tag clouds at the top of its page — trends pulled in from Twitter and divided into categories (People, Places, Products, Popular Now.) Click on an item and you’ll get what appears to be a live Twitter stream as well as Bing search results. (the way that the stream is placed in relation to the search results makes it look like your search results are getting heckled.) BingTweets offers a handy form to tweet your search results as well as an autoplay function for the tag clouds, which creeped me out a little.

You can also search both sources with your own keywords, but use the search form at the top of the page instead of the more obvious one smack in the middle of the page with the Bing window. I searched for tomato sandwich (haven’t had breakfast yet.) Bing gave me several recipes and a restaurant in Cape Cod along with several related searches, while Twitter gave me the revelation that many people tweet their sandwich consumption.

This is a gentle introduction to Bing and the tag clouds are an interesting way to explore Twitter and the Web at the same time, but I miss some of the deeper activity and keyword analysis that you get with exclusively Twitter-oriented tools like CrowdEye.

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