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1. Local Twitter Use with Google and Bing

   sujata on January 27th, 2010

   Tags: browser

   First there was Bing with its localized content, then Twitter Local, the app ( designed on Adobe Air by the way) that helps you find out who in your immediate geographical neighborhood is online and tweeting, and now there are Bing and Google Maps (and the iPhone) offering to pinpoint tweets on a map for you, to locate where exactly in your neighborhood a tweet you are interested in emanates from. Using this kind of locating with Bing requires Bing Maps Beta and Microsoft Silverlight. Google Maps makes it much easier on you: you can just use an RSS feed of the tweet stream, that includes the geolocation. The way it is implemented is pretty amusing in itself. You are just supposed to open Google Maps, and paste into the search box the URL of any Twitter feed that you are interested in. Right away, you get a bunch of blue location balloons on the map. Click on any one of them, and you should get the tweet itself. Google Maps will even remember all your favorite twitter streams for the next time you open it.

   The iPhone works just the same way; but Bing Maps, surprisingly, takes the lead in visual appeal, even compared to the iPhone. Next to Bing Maps, Google Maps clearly looks a decade old. The balloons contain little Twitter icons, and it displays tweeted pictures too. But Twitter is different on Bing (Bing calls that search engine Bing Twitter). What Bing calls a hot topic is not what Twitter calls one. Bing’s Beta version now allows Twitter results on the search page, and also a cloud of the most happening topics on Twitter, hot in Bing’s opinion, not Twitter. It may not seem like much if you don’t put stock in Twitter, but Bing’s Twitter search usually has a half minute lag to when tweets appear on Twitter. Microsoft ascribes this to the processing they have to do before they publish a search result: removing duplicates, flagging adult content, and so on. Things could improve – they are after all still in beta.

   Related Posts:

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   • Bing has Silverlight and Google has HTML 5
   • Bing Tries to be too Thoughtful for Google
   • Effects of the Microsoft – Yahoo deal on SEO
   • MSN ‘s Butterfly Metamorphoses into Something More Sparkly

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 2:58 am and is filed under internet, search engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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