Bing and Twitter fuse together in bingtweets.com

And so it begins...

Today, I learned that Microsoft launched a beta hybrid social media search engine, bingtweets.com. I think I was on vacation when this all went down, otherwise I'm sure I would have tackled the topic sooner... a service that boasts "Fusing Twitter Trends with Bing Insights" ? Yes, please!

Have you tested out bingtweets.com yet? I'm far from a bing fan, but the concept is pretty cool. And the features ain't bad either. Here's a run-through of the elements I found interesting while tinkering around on bingtweets.com this afternoon

Let's start from top to bottom, left to right.

1) In the upper left corner is a decent sized box for Trending Topics.

The topics are broken up into tabs and categorized by Popular Now, People, Places, and Products. There are three buttons on the top left box where these trending topics are, that resemble rewind, fast forward, and play buttons.

I haven't quite figured out the strategic movement of the buttons, if there is one. As far as I can tell, clicking these buttons skips randomly forward and back between the trending topics, and filters the tweets and search results in the boxes below accordingly. I also noticed that each time you refresh the page, the SERPs and tweets are populated by a new trending topic, unless you specify otherwise.

2) Moving up and to the right, there is a search box that invites you to "Search Bing and Twitter."

Any keyphrase you enter in this box will update the two main elements of this page accordingly- the real-time Tweet feed and the Bing SERPs.

3) Moving down, there is a nifty box where you can instantly share your bingtweet.com results.

You can share your findings on Twitter or a variety of other social sites, including Facebook, emails, Delicious, MySpace, Wordpress, Fark, Digg, Reddit, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Technorati, Xanga, Blogger, Livejournal, Sphinn, and more.

The default message in the box goes a little something like this: Check out Bing Tweets about [keyphrase] + [tiny URL to current Bing Tweets page] #Bing.

Well, that's one way to get your brand a trending topic. Have it inserted in every tweet shared from that site by default! Of course, you can edit these tweets to read anything you want, but there you have it.

Note: when you click on a different keyphrase from the trending topic cloud, the canned tweet is automatically updated to reflect what you're currently searching for. That's handy-dandy!

4) Moving down and to the left, the real-time waterfall of keyword-related tweets.

This is pretty much exactly thing you'd see if you went to search.twitter.com, but the column is constantly trickling down as new tweets filter in in real-time.

5) Moving over to the right, the typical Bing search engine.

Because every element of the bingtweets.com homepage is nestled into its own little box compartment, this SERP looks almost like a screenshot. Alas, it is far from static! Enter any keyword and behold SERPs upon SERPs that reflect your search.

Some notes on the features...

• One neat thing about bingtweets.com is that you can continue to use the Bing search box to search for different keyphrases while preserving the keyword filtered tweets rolling down on the left of the screen. This means if I wanted to do a business-related search and be completely vain at the same time, I could search for the topic of my next blog post in the Bing SERPs on the right side of the screen, and still see every tweet containing my handle (@beebow) in the scrolling tweets on the left.

• Another nice feature is that each link you click on in the SERPs merely refreshes that search results box on the page; so you don't have to navigate away from bingtweets.com to access the content on that page.

• On top of the SERP box, you also have the option to "open Bing in new window," which opens the same SERP in a new tab, or "return to Bing," which brings you back to the original SERP on the bingtweets.com page.

• On the contrary, it looks like everything you click on in the tweets column, whether it be a timestamp, a Twitter handle, or a link, a new tab or window opens with the corresponding page.

No doubt about it - we're moving into a world where real-time conversations and algorithm-ranked search results are not only intermingling, but sustaining and complimenting one another. I'm excited to see where this leads next... how about you?