Bing has a new beta page for searches, Bing Social. This pulls information from Twitter and Facebook with options to select the time frame and the source, whether it is public updates or Shared Links. As with most things to do with Facebook at the moment there might be fears about people’s information being shared when its not meant to so Bing have made sure that no personal information is pulled from the services and then listed on the pages.

TechFlash have a good overview of when the feature was announced and what it can do with a video with a video of how the Social page works.

Liveside are reporting that the beta page is available but only only in the US, I however have access to it in the UK but all the trending topics are from the US and there appears to be no way of changing where they are from.

For the past month or so Windows has teamed up with Sky and toured universities around the UK informing student just how great Windows 7 is and how they can access Sky through their PC. This is a great way to increase mindshare of Windows but there is much more to Windows Access All Areas than just informing people about the features of Windows 7.

Microsoft have also been providing students in the UK a chance to win 4 different entertainment experience starting with a trip to the movies for the lucky student and 3 mates and improving to the 4th prize which has now been unlocked, a trip to New York City. This competition is still open to UK students at the Windows Access All Areas Facebook page.

But still there is more to this campaign for people in the UK, anyone who “likes” Windows Access All Areas on Facebook or follows WindowsAAA on Twitter can win copies of Windows 7, DVD box sets etc by entering small competitions. They run these competitions very regularly so you would do well to like and follow these guys and win some goodies. They also share lots of entertaining news and videos on these accounts which I have found to be very interesting and funny.

They seem to have much more planned for the summer too promising a “another little summer bag of surprises coming your way” soon. I am really looking forward to what else these guys have planned to give away and its a great way to get more people to like Windows 7 and Microsoft.

You can “like” Windows Access All Areas on Facebook and follow them on Twitter at @WindowsAAA.

Today Microsoft is thought to have unveiled a new look MSN for the UK, although I haven’t found any official word on this yet the the new look site will be going live at 8:30 PM. The new design for the site keeps the basic look, blue background and header with many links, but adds some much needed refinement and features to match that of the US MSN pages.

The site will allow users to sign in to Windows Live, Facebook and Twitter and receive all the latest news from those sites right on the MSN homepage. There will also be a continuation of the focus on Windows Live Hotmail and Messenger well as Internet Explorer all right at the top of the page. Users familiar with the US site will notice the content boxes, highlighted by the blue lines, which allow for easy switching between the tabbed sections of the information boxes, making it much easier for people to read the content they want to without leaving the page.

Another aspect of the new design to note is the prominence of the MSN Video Player, Microsoft answer in the UK to Hulu in the US, which although doing well has suffered from lack of discoverability. The MSN logo also appears to be being changed to match the US version.

After first seeing the image of the new design for the US version of MSN I have been eagerly waiting for a redesign of the UK site, that finally seems to be coming albeit in only a few areas.

I will let you know if I hear anything more official from Microsoft about this.

New: I have just been sent the Press Release about the MSN update and the claim the MSN page is the UK’s “most popular news and entertainment portal homepage” with 20.6 million unique visitors each month. They claim that the new site “is faster to download, adds more video content, more news and adds access to Facebook and Twitter as well as Microsoft services like Hotmail and Windows Live”.

They have identified some of the most important new features as:

• Social media – an integrated social networking section that means users can access and update Windows Live, Facebook and Twitter directly from the homepage
• More news – an innovative news info-pane, with top headlines, breaking stories and weird and wonderful tales from around the world
• Bigger and better Hotmail – Hotmail inbox from the homepage, allowing them to be updated when new mail has been received
• Larger images – a new slideshow at the top of the homepage that provides consumers with access to up-to-the-minute news, exclusive editors’ picks and the latest new videos at the click of a button.  Sports, Cars and Money also have a new spot on the homepage, while the simple alphabetical navigation bar locates MSN channels instantly
• New brand – a sleek new MSN logo that has been rolled out across the UK site, synching up with the new global brand of MSN
• Content – all the best from user favourites, such as Entertainment, Life & Style, Tech & Gadgets, Shopping, Him, as well as personal essentials like Local, Weather, and Horoscopes.
• Video – the ability to watch clips from within the homepage, plus access to the latest HD videos and VOD with MSN Video Player

Perhaps most importantly you can check out the new features of the revised MSN site at http://www.tourmsn.co.uk/, enjoy.

Microsoft have just launched an alpha release of another new social network oriented service called Project Emporia which “allows users who may not otherwise use social networks to get information on topics from the public Twitter feeds”. It works by allowing anyone to view a stream of Tweets from a specific “lens” or category using various search terms, users can then like or dislike a specific tweet which will then rank tweets. The more likes the higher chance that a tweet will be read by someone in the “highly ranked web link results” viewing pane. This project is currently open for anyone to start using but only Fuse Lab employees can current like/dislike tweets.

Its a very simple concept and one that could well make people use Twitter for its valuable information who otherwise would avoid the micro blogging service. It should also allow well season Twitter users to quickly find tweets that are important to them that they may well have missed. You can check out all the information and FAQs about this new project here.

I think the idea is great and it has an interesting interface with the big balls of statistical information on the front page and it’ll be interesting to see how this project develops.

I have to say I am quite amazed at the rate the Microsoft’s Fuse Lab are churning out new and interesting ideas for social interactions on the web, they might not all be feature complete but they do all have so innovative ideas and I look forward to seeing more from them.

Long Zheng has found another excellent video about a new product/service that Microsoft is working on. This time it comes in the way of a Microsoft sponsored project to bring a more visual, perhaps personal, twitter-like service to consumers. This service appears to use the Xbox Live service found on the Xbox and soon Windows Phone 7 devices to display users avatars as well as their location.

I am working on the assumption that we will see this project released to the market at some point, Long thinks we will see some iteration of this at E3, which will be great.

What I find interesting about this project is that Microsoft is unlikely to want to be directly competing with the likes of Twitter and Facebook as they have set up some important partnerships with those two social networking giants. However I expect this service will alongside the established networks and will look for key words in people’s status updates and tweets and then use a video image from what I expect to be a massive collection of different activities, locations and feelings. What this is likely to do is create a more person and more engaging experience for people to see what their friends are up too as reading streams and stream of text isn’t always that much fun.

This video and project again reassures me Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division is becoming an increasingly major player in an increasing number of consumer markets.

Let’s hope this project will be implemented as part of the Xbox Live and Windows Live services over the coming months and hopefully will be another thing to look forward to Microsoft demoing at E3, with Project Natal being the major thing.

Earlier this week an article was posted prematurely on the Bing Blog which was about a new feature to allow users to embed a Bing Map on any website with the Twitter Map App features overlaid.

Below you can see the options for the widget which is very easy to set up and embed with controls for a fixed or moving map, the widget’s dimensions and which, if any, filters are wanted.

One thing that I found to be slightly odd was I used the keyword Bing I found several of the selected tweets to not contain the word Bing. I would hope to see some more Bing Maps widgets in the future, it would be great to browse StreetSide around a specific place on a website, making use of the Twitter and Photosynths around the location.

In other Bing news this week it has been reported that Microsoft have struck a deal with Motorola who will be offering Bing as the default search engine and mapping platforms on their Android devices first in China and then globally. This is the second time in only a few weeks that a company has announced they wont use Google as the default search engine on Google’s own mobile OS after AT&T announced they would be using Yahoo!.

Bing has posted an article about how they and Microsoft are working with Facebook and the two points to note are that Bing is now powering the search for all 400m+ Facebook users and Microsoft will no longer serve ads for the social network.

Its not a monumentally interesting post but if you look at figures from The Economist it shows that Windows Live is the second largest social networking site with Facebook being the largest by a long way.

The news from Bing today means that Bing now powers searching on the two largest social network, a pretty big proverbial feather to have in one’s hat. Microsoft are in a prime position to make searching extremely sociable and provide better results. With Microsoft and Facebook working together and Facebook trying to compete with Twitter over real time updates Bing could well be a real competitor to Twitter’s search functionality; I guess Twitter is looking more attractive to Google (or Apple) by the day.

Seeing as I am trying to make My Microsoft Life more social I thought I would share with you what people were tweeting about their “My Microsoft Life”, the results are varied to say the least. I have been following the “My Microsoft Life” search for a couple of weeks and from what I can gather people seem to dislike Microsoft due to something they can fix, often it has been trivial problems, or with a piece of software not actually made by Microsoft; relatively few tweets have been truly anti Microsoft.

Aside from any tweets from me in a list of 19 tweets there were 7 pro Microsoft tweets, 9 anti Microsoft and 3 tweets that weren’t really inclined either way. From the snapshot it appears that people are very happy with Microsoft Office with 4 tweets positively and only one negatively.

It would be interesting to know if these people are running Office 2010 beta or are using 2007. There is also excitement over Microsoft Courier and a new Web Cam and praise for Microsoft support, however it appears some people aren’t happy with Windows, maybe they haven’t tried 7 yet.

Following this post I shall be editing the Keep In Touch page so you can more easily see what people are saying about Microsoft and their Microsoft Lives and get involved in the My Microsoft Life community.

With all my predictions for Windows Live Wave 4 I have been quite about Messenger only because I have had no idea what the team would be likely to do to improve the client, there were things I had wanted to see such as greater integration between social media and emails within the software but doubted such things would come in Wave 4. Well today Neowin kept their promise and showed us some screenshots of the new Windows Live Messenger and Writer. There wasn’t any more info to accompany the pictures but a few things did strike me.

There are a couple more screenshots on the Neowin post.

Messenger Meets Zune

The first thing that I noticed was the navigation in Messenger is very much like the Zune navigation, obviously with different titles.

You can see that the main sections are categorised in the same way with filters of specific types below, a navigation style that is simple and easy to use.

Another area where the Zune software design can be seen is for the list of contacts where a similar design is used for lists of media collections in the Zune software; small, uppercase and bold text.

Perhaps we will see other aspects of the Zune Software within the Messenger client and the Windows Live suite, I know a MixView of friends would be a good way to browse friends and see how they know each other.

I am also thinking that we can expect a refresh to the online services that will bring a similar look and feel to the internet, as Messenger is the only application that looks like the online services.

Messenger’s Additions

I have read a few tweets about what people seem to think about the screenshot of the new Messenger and it seems a lot of people don’t like the fact that there is a lot more width to the client. I am not bothered by the additional width so long as the SOCIAL and FRIENDS feeds provide plenty of interesting and engaging content; I am not a big fan of the current What’s New feed from Windows Live only because most of my friends haven’t bothered to link their various accounts to provide with new information. I would guess that is possible to make the new Messenger look just like the current version so it doesn’t taske up too much screen space.

Several ways this additional field would be useful would be if emails and other social media updates directed at me showed up here, rather than having to use another application to access the information. This might not be such a ridiculous wish when you notice the little icon down in the bottom right hand corner.

Looks to me that we will be able to add many more feeds and connections to Messenger, maybe we will be able to chat to our Facebook Friends and get updates from Twitter within the Messenger client. I wonder if Microsoft is attempting to create an application that combines the Seesmic and Digsby to provide a single place for people to go to keep updated and connected.

As always this is probably only wishful thinking but with the most magical time of the year nearly upon us could it happen?

The other day I was very excited to see that Microsoft Tag were running a competition on Twitter to win a copy of Halo ODST, a Kodak Zi8 camera or an Xbox 360. I immediately tweeted and entered myself into the competition. I then saw that to win the Xbox users needed to get as many retweets as possible, so, as it says on the Microsoft Tag page about the competition, I asked people to retweet me and www.microsoft.com/tag/tt #tagtuesday. I was very happy when I saw several of my followers retweet the tweet, however I don’t think any of the retweets will count as the official rules of the competition say differently.

On the Tag page advertising the competition…

…and then the official rules…

I have sent messages on Twitter to various members of the Tag team and I believe they are working on clarifying the issue now.

At the time of writing this the tag team have said users need to tweet, exactly, "#Win awesome prizes from Microsoft. Just follow @microsofttag and ReTweet http://ow.ly/B7la". I will update with any more information.

Incidentally I would be very thankfully of anyone who tweets the following message: RT @Gilly2468; #Win awesome prizes from Microsoft. Just follow @microsofttag and retweet. I have yet to own an Xbox and think, with regards to this blog title, I probably should own one but a student’s finances are very prohibitive of buying one.