When Windows 7 started the marketing campaign with the statement 'Windows 7 was my idea' I really liked it because I was able to relate to it myself. A few years ago when Windows Vista came out I blogged about the Windows Vista Shutdown options and how I think they could improve to make things a bit easier. Before I knew it, when Windows 7 came out the Windows 7 Shutdown options looked like they included my suggestion, it may be the case that someone read it on my blog or it's more likely the case that others had thought the same idea that I had. Either way, it felt nice to see that an idea I had had actually really made it into a product and it fits well with the 'Windows 7 was my idea' tagline.
If you follow my blog you will also know that I've been keeping a close look Live Search/Bing and search in general for a long time now and had a few thoughts on innovation in search engines. So it really pleases me to see new features in search engines especially ones that seem somewhat close to ideas I had in mind! In my Search Engine Innovation: Bing vs Google post I wrote a few months ago I explained something which I named UserRank
"Finally, one feature that I would REALLY love to see in future search engine's is what I'll call UserRank! I think in the time of social networking it would make some sense to allow user's to contribute to the ranking of sites and not just rely on page ranks ?etc, and while this approach does have some implications and potential of unfair usage here's how I think it would work:
For each search result that appears in the results page the page would have a button similar to Facebook's 'I Like this' feature. This button would then allow the searcher to tag a search result as useful and then contribute to the rank of the search result. I think this feature if implemented successfully can be good in that if someone was searching for something and finds a useful search result after a lot of digging then the useful result's rank would improve based on how many unique 'I Like this' have been done and as a result the next person searching for the same thing would find a useful result without having to do all the hard work again."
So hearing about the partnership between Facebook & Bing and what changes are happening with the Bing search engine are really pleasing. I?ll be blogging more about the features when they get rolled out. However, in the meantime you can check the following links for previews/info on the changes.
- Facebook Blog
- Bing Community Blogs: Bing get's more Social with Facebook
- Bing Community Blogs: New signals in search the Bing Social Layer
To wrap up, I think it's not unfair to use the tagline 'Bing search was my idea!'
I've had a play with the idea I suggested in my previous post about this topic and using the Facebook Developer Toolkit it was possible to get a lot of information out of Facebook and display those in a .NET application and you can also get info back in XML format so this should work well with a gadget. So far so good...
BUT the problem with using the toolkit or the Facebook API for that matter is authenticating your Facebook application user so you can get some info. For a web application you have to redirect to the Facebook login page let users login and then capture the authentication token... For having a Windows Live gadget I'm not sure yet how to do an alternative to this, would have been nice if there was an API method that lets you pass in login details for authentication...
Will have to think about a way to work around this so that I can carry on with my gadget development otherwise I'm not entirely sure this idea will work.
I've recently been wanting a lot to dig deeper into other areas of Windows Live that I don't know much about and get myself to learn more about these. Of course the hard thing in moving forward with that stuff aside from motivation is thinking of an idea of something that can be done.
I think I found an answer to that today! Here's something I'm going to try and see if I can do with or without help and I think it's a cool idea! One that will help me learn more about Windows Live Gadgets and also Facebook!
Here's the plan. I will attempt to get some data from Facebook and show this data on Windows Live and the idea is basically to allow you to see a little bit of your Facebook stuff on your Windows Live homepage.
- A couple of possibilities would be perhaps status updates of friends,notifications, and also showing who's online...
Sounds like an interesting project to work on, will see how it goes!