Bing wants to recommend content based on social activity

Bing released a social content sidebar about six months ago.  The huge influence and excitement that social networks generate has enormous interest for both users and business.

The social sidebar focused on four key elements:

• Ask Friends
• Friends Who Might Know
• People Who Know
• Activity Feed

Bing is now diving deeper through into the shares, likes, photos, comments and status updates that it sees on Facebook from those connected to you in order to make content more relevant and extend interaction potential with content. Additionally, the social side bar gives Bing social network capabilities without attempting to contend against Facebook and Linkedin in the way Google has built a social network. It has become a mission priority to boost activity for many websites (and search engines) by incorporating social sharing and recommendation tools to boost engagement.

The social sidebar just underwent a few interesting visual changes 6 months after it's initial roll-out.

• Gray background has been removed and is now the same white background as the body of the search page
• The Facebook share button has become a “Post” to Facebook button
• New "Social Results" are available in the header
• A count for matching social results has been introduced
• Changes "Friends Who Might Know" and “People Who Know" headings to "From Friends" and "From Social Networks"
• Removed the  activity stream of general questions that friends have listed on Facebook