Thursday Dose of social media: Microsoft’s Bing to challenge Google

Microsoft’s Bing hides its best features — Bing is a new search engine that shows a lot of promise. Microsoft is again trying to challenge Google in the search space. It’s too early to say if Bing could be better than Google in everyday use, but there are instances where Bing makes more sense to use than Google:

Unlike Google, which generally returns links to mere web sites, Bing crawls listings at review services like Yelp.com and CitySearch. It then summarizes the results and displays a scorecard for each, rating things like service, drinks, food, wait time, lunch offerings, and so on, all laid out in a neat comparative table.

Bing is also great at finding travel information. Activating the travel tab puts you in a full-service reservation system. From there you can book tickets and even get tips about when to buy to get the best price.

The early version of Bing has some issues. But, if used for certain queries, Bing could be a very nice compliment to Google:

On the positive side, we discovered Bing does much more than search for relevant links. It retrieves and processes data, and renders it smartly. That makes finding a great restaurant or an airline ticket, a snap.

But the service is far from perfect. Beautiful data mash-ups coexist side-by-side with perplexing interface choices that make it hard to find the best features. Meanwhile, actual search results were inaccurate in some cases, and disappointing overall in the local search category, one of the areas Microsoft hopes to make its biggest splash.

Users Over 55 Quitting Facebook: The Baby Boom Times Over? — It appears that people over 55 are trying Facebook and not really liking it:

Between November 2008 and February 2009, the baby boomer set (age 55-65) was one of the fastest growing segments on the social network, up 175.3% for females and 137.8% for males, according to the statistics. But that user boom was short-lived, and those users aren’t returning in the same numbers.

In April and May there were actually 650,000 less users over the age of 55 on Facebook than the previous two months — the only age demographic where the site experienced a decrease in users over that period. Facebook grew by over 4% each month over the past two months, according to the blog’s measurements, which are based on data from Facebook’s advertiser tools, but its inability to hold the attention of its older users is interesting.

Social media is still a young(er) persons game. Perhaps the issue isn’t with social media, but rather the fact that most social media sites were made for younger people (Facebook was originally college only). What if someone created a social network aimed at baby boomers?

Is this a segment that newspapers could tap into? Boomers are still very loyal to newspapers.

Typekit aims to make Web fonts suck less — One of the biggest problems with Web design is font support. Web browsers support very few fonts, and different browsers and computers support different fonts. This severely limits typographic options for Web designers, and also makes it hard to predict how Web sites will look on people’s computers.

There are some not-so-desirable workarounds like putting fonts into images or using Flash. Those both have large drawbacks, especially for accessibility. Typekit plans to change all of that:

That’s where Typekit comes in. We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.

As a Typekit user, you’ll have access to our library of high-quality fonts. Just add a line of JavaScript to your markup, tell us what fonts you want to use, and then craft your pages the way you always have. Except now you’ll be able to use real fonts. This really is going to change web design.

Typekit launches this summer. We’ll have more after it launches.

Another Twitter expert who didn’t bother to learn — Listen, before you bash Twitter or any other new technology, at least use it first. Try to understand why people like it.

Is Twitter for everyone? No. But it can help a lot of journalists do their jobs better. To me, it’s at least worth trying.

Steve Buttry argues why news orgs should consider Twitter and why people should try Twitter first before bashing it:

Twitter does pose some threats to newspapers, though I see it as more of an opportunity. As more and more people get their news from Twitter (and not just because journalists and news sources are Twittering, but from people tweeting as they live the news and from Twitter aggregating tweets as news unfolds) and other social media, newspapers need to use these tools effectively and adjust our print products to this rapidly changing world.

Trent Reznor And Twitter Help Raise over $850,000 for Fan in Need — Nine Inch Nails’ frontman Trent Reznor and fans have helped raise more than $850,000 for a fan who needs a heart transplant. The fan was denied a transplant, but through the power of Twitter and social media, Reznor and company were quickly able to get the word out and start raising money.

Very important part of this story was Trent Reznor’s Twitter account, which he used vigorously to draw attention to this cause. Together with his 571,839 motivated followers, many of whom also tweeted and retweeted about this campaign, they’ve shown how powerful a tool Twitter can be.

Still doubt the power of social media?

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Thursday Dose of social media: Web metrics are in ‘crisis’ according to media exec

Digital media exec: metrics are ‘in crisis’ — The only real way to sell advertisers on the value of a medium is with good metrics. Advertisers haven’t bitten too hard with digital media yet, and news that media execs consider Web metrics to be in a state of crisis is not good:

A major source of the crisis, said Kint, is the proliferation of newer research sources that, while aiming to improve metrics, have only made things more confusing. For example, he mentioned the increasingly common practice buyers and sellers blending together panel-based figures from companies like Nielsen and comScore with data from analytics companies like Compete and Google, which can lead to inaccurate comparisons and conclusions. “It gets pretty crazy,” he said.

Another problem that stems from the Web’s inherent trackability, according to Christy Tanner, editor in chief and vp, marketing, TV Guide, is that too many publishers get fixated on driving up the measures that advertisers care about, such as page-views—without considering their site’s user experience. “If everything you do is based on [driving] advertiser metrics, you’re gonna lose your users,” she said.

It’s so true. If you only care about making money, you’ll probably do a poor job at it. If you care about making a great user experience, however, you’ll probably end up making money because happy consumers equals money.

Twitter Search to dive deeper, rank results — Twitter will soon begin searching not only the text in each tweet, but will also begin indexing the content of links in tweets. In addition, Twitter search will be getting several other features that could make it a legit competitor to Google (especially for real-time results):

This will make Twitter Search a much more complete index of what’s happening in real time on the Web and make it an even more credible competitor to Google Search for people looking for very timely content.

Twitter Search will also get a “reputation” ranking system soon, Jayaram told me. When you do a search on a “trending” topic–a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar–Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank the search results in part based on that.

Ning opens up more to developers — Ning has been a popular tool of journalists and news organizations, and it just got a more useful by allowing for more customization. These new features are long overdue, but they should help make Ning a better option for content creators.

Ning also has a new feature called Ning Apps:

There are a couple of things that make Ning Apps different from the social platforms found on the likes of Facebook or MySpace. While the earlier, limited array of apps offered on Ning was strictly for members to embed on their profiles, the formal Ning Apps product is geared toward the creators and administrators of Ning social networks. They can add an application–from a cash donation widget for a nonprofit network, to a ticket sales app for a band’s fan page, to a live video stream of what-have-you–and it’ll mesh right into the social network.

“A Ning network creator selects one of these apps, that functions basically like a full-fledged feature on the social network, and by choosing to install an app the app has a presence on the front page of the social network,” Jason Rosenthal, Ning’s senior vice president of business operations, told CNET News. “It gets a dedicated tab within a social network, and perhaps most interestingly, by default the app is installed on every (member’s) profile page of that social network.”