Wow it seems that the search innovation trend that Bing kicked off a couple of weeks ago has been picked up by Photobucket who today announced a new Visual Search feature that takes searching for images and sharing them with friends to the next level. They’ve created a slick experience using Silverlight to search, browse and interact with images and then used the Windows Live Messenger Library to add a whole new vector – sharing via IM! Try the app out here!
I’m intrigued by the social side of the app (aka the sharing) and it’s a great conversation starter to the discussion that Angus and I have been bouncing around for the last few weeks; do users want to swim around in the stream looking for interesting information (i.e. a news feed) or do they want to be pushed information by their close friends and get it front of mind (i.e. an IM chat). Perhaps it’s a mixture of both with more value being attributed to the latter rather than the former.
Looking at the same choice, which is valuable for publishers of information? By that I mean the Photobuckets of this world who are interested in getting new users to party on their websites. Perhaps the answer to this question is an amicable, both, or put another way, different strokes for different folks. What’s clear is that it’ll be really interesting to advertisers and publishers to find out which is more effective when it comes to pushing their product or service.
On the tech side what’s behind the scenes here? Well the Windows Live Messenger Library is a very slick set of javascript libraries that provide programmability into the Messenger Service (our big datacenter in the cloud) that powers the client experience across Windows, Mac, Xbox and WinMo for 330m users every month. Incidentally it’s nearly Windows Live Messenger’s 10th Birthday!
The Library allows ANY website on ANY platform using ANY language to integrate IM capabilities and provide instant sharing of content to Messenger users. To get started head over to the Interactive SDK where you can get a feel for what you can do with it, then check out our demo website Pulse that has the full capabilities baked into a sample.
If you are interested in seeing screenshots of the whole flow of user acquisition Angus has a great post on that.