Federated Media Teams With Bing For BingTweets. It's Exactly What It Sounds Like.

Bing certainly isn’t wasting any time in showing off how much it loves Twitter. The search engine has just launched BingTweets, a new site created in tandem with Federated Media that combines Twitter Search results with Bing Search. The hybrid allows users to browse through Bing while they see a stream of real-time results fly by, which could be particularly useful for researching a current event, or perhaps a new movie.

The top of the site features a listing of popular terms, grouped into a general ‘popular now’ category, and then divided by People Places, and Products. You’re also free to search for whatever term you’d like using the box in the upper right hand corner of the screen.

The resulting site could prove useful, but it’s a little cluttered, with a scrolling list of constantly updated Tweets on the left side and your standard Bing search results on the right. This would be fine, were it not for the large ‘trending topics’ section and ‘sharing’ sections in the header which should probably be tucked along the side. My biggest gripe, though, is that the Bing search results are in a frame — I’d much rather just have the whole page dedicated to the results, even if I had to sacrifice the nice blue border.

This isn’t Bing’s first attempt to fuse its results with Tweets — the site began rolling out integrated results from Twitter earlier this month, but it is only using results from especially prolific and popular Tweeters, which diminishes the feature’s value. Microsoft has previously worked with Federated Media on the launch of ExecTweets, a Twitter aggregator that displays tweets from top business executives.

One side note: Microsoft actually released BingTweets around an hour ago, but it went down almost immediately afterward, and performance is still very spotty. BingTweets will still certainly be a hit in the Twittersphere, but there’s no better way to kill your virality.