To build upon their “Bing Is For Doing” philosophy, America’s second largest search engine has decided that it will follow in Google’s footsteps and provide social integration.  More information about the merger of social and search platforms across the web can be found in a previous 90blog post.  Bing will attempt to do what Google has decided against and use Facebook (among other social networking sites) as its primary tool to get answers for its users.  As Bing says, “Recent attempts at social search haven’t unlocked the full potential of tapping our social networks.”  Through an integrated format called the Sidebar, users will be able to get the opinion of friends, family, and colleagues online, much as you would in person.

While it’s nearly impossible to predict the future of the ever changing web, many experts are expecting that combining social and search will be the next big trend.  Google has already established itself as the pioneer in this field by combining Google Search and Google+; however, Google isn’t the only web giant interested in bringing the two tactics together.  It is rumored that Facebook is developing a search engine that combines a user’s location and friends’ interests to provide search query results.

Do constant Farmville posts litter your newsfeed? The viral, farming simulation game and its 32 million monthly users “buy cows” and “harvest crops” to achieve rankings against their friends and the Farmville community. The game introduced real currency where users could pay to enhance their virtual-farm’s animals and crops. Recently, a similar platform has emerged that’s not just fun and games.

Beginning in January, Facebook rolled out a new form of ad called “Sponsored Stories” which places company posts in users’ news feeds. These ads are labeled “sponsored” or “featured” within users’ news feeds to clearly identify them as advertisements.  Previously, Facebook had these sponsored ads on the ticker portion of its pages (in the upper left-hand corner), but these new ads now appear in the main news feed. Furthermore, Sponsored Stories will only appear on a user’s news feed if they or someone they are connected to has already interacted with the company page in some way, including liking the page or checking in to a place page.

Facebook has made some pretty drastic changes to its user interface over the last few months, and users are giving it mixed reviews. By now, we are all aware that Facebook Timeline rolled out to the general public starting on December 15th, but some users aren’t taking this “upgrade” very well. In fact, some users have even defected in recent weeks to get away from Facebook’s ever-changing customer experience. A new social media outlet, Friend.io, has emerged as a Facebook alternative which boasts a much more traditional look and feel to counter Facebook Timeline.