Bing + Twitter = ?

It seems that Microsoft, in an effort to become more relevant, has started adding Twitter posts to Bing search results. The results are not comprehensive, but rather based on those people who are considered to be "influential" because of their number of followers, etc. This is a deviation from other search engines and while I have to commend MS for doing something different, I'm not really sure if it's going to prove valuable or not.

The naysayers are likely to suggest that Twitter is another Internet fad that will eventually run its course. It's hard to argue that a large portion of what happens there is not banal and relatively useless to the the majority of the population. If Bing was indexing and returning everything Twitter had to offer, I cannot see much value add in it.

I think where they may be able to differentiate themselves is in the breaking news and real-time information space. Things like Twitter and Facebook updates have repeatedly proven themselves as a viable source to learn about the latest happenings in various parts of the world. While there is a certain level of media hype in recent stories, I can attest that the first place I heard about recent celebrity deaths was on Facebook. Now I don't necessarily think everyone needs to be up to the second on celebrity news, but the application could likely be transitioned to any subject. If Bing is able to get the algorithm right, they could end up as the de facto aggregation source of socialized news and that could end up being a very profitable business model.