‘Bing’ your social search with Facebook

Most of you have used Facebook search, and must have seen the search page having profile of searched persons along with web search results from Bing. Well, there is business agreement between their parents: Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corporation. And now, you have more power in your kitty with Bing web search going social aided by your Facebook account.

How to use?

To use  Bing social search, you’ll have to be logged in to your Facebook account. If you are already logged in, you may directly open up Bing home page at http://www.bing.com  and start exploring social search. Otherwise, you can open up the home page and go to the top right part and click on ‘Sign in’ to sign in with your Facebook credentials.

Privacy

Remember, your privacy is taken care of very seriously, so you remain tensionless. Only your friends will see what you have liked or shared. Your public Facebook profile information will only appear to people based on your Search for you on Facebook setting on Facebook. For example, if set to Friends of Friends, then only your Facebook friends and friends of friends would be able to find you in Facebook profile search on Bing For a public computer, it is recommended to sign out of your Facebook account after your session is over.

Social search details

Bing embeds in the web search page the results which have your friends’ likes- news, celebs, activities, etc., and while you search for hot news and topics, you can gain further relevance from your friends’ likes.

 

Along with these, you can also search for people. Bing social search shows the most relevant people to you. It gains relevance from your mutual friends. Just type in the person’s name and hit search. Along with the profile pic and number of mutual friends, you have the link to ‘Add as friend’ as well as ‘Send a message’.

Turning off social search

You can disable the feature by clicking on “Disable” in the top-right portion of your first five search pages. After that, you can do it manually by going to ‘Privacy Settings’ in your Facebook account.

 

Details: http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/gg276362.aspx

Save your doc- unprintable and eco-friendly!

 

Whoa, an unprintable document! Yes, we have a nice format now. The “.wwf”. The WWF format is an initiative of the WWF Germany in cooperation with Jung von Matt, Hamburg, supported by Dederichs Reinecke & Partner.

Official Website: http://saveaswwf.com/

Facebook Page: http://facebook.com/saveaswwf

The WWF format has an extension “.wwf” that works like a normal PDF document, but without the ability to print it.

According to the founders of the WWF format, every day, entire forests all around in the planet are cut down to make paper, and most of them are used to print documents like books, reports, emails, websites, etc.,. Many printed documents do not constitute the original information requirement, so along with just a few requisite information, mostly unnecessary information also gets through the printer and then on papers, marking a huge wastage of paper. The paper ultimately comes at a compelling and undeniable environmental cost and is a huge loss for present as well as future.

How to use?

1. Download the free software from the official website.

2. Install it and restart your computer.

3. You can open any document in existing formats (.doc, .txt, .pdf, etc.) and select “SAVE AS WWF” option from the Print menu.

4. Now, either print it or save it to your location. [Printing only generates a document which can be saved, not a print command to really print out that document.]

5. The ‘.wwf’ format resembles ‘.pdf’ and can be opened in any PDF reader like Sumatra PDF, Foxit Reader, Adobe Reader, etc..

Pros:

1. You can convert those documents into ‘.wwf’ format which you think do not deserve an unnecessary print, as it prevents printing. This way you can encourage others you share your documents with.

2. You do not require any extra software for using the ‘.wwf’ format other than the driver. It is compatible with any PDF reader.

3. It is free of cost and promotes sense of responsibility towards environment.

Cons:

1. Size of each document will be around 231,500 bytes (or 1.852 MB) more in ‘.wwf’ format than in ‘.pdf’ format. The additional size is due to what is explained in point 2.

[For a tiny document I tried, the attributes are as follows:

.txt = 369 bytes;  .pdf = 3,576 bytes;  .wwf = 235,237 bytes]

2. A page that promotes the project with some information and website URL is appended to each of your documents, which seems to be odd and out of standard. Many called it a silly viral marketing. But other way round, it is is good to promote such innovative projects.

Overall:

Shift your paradigm towards usage of general formats for saving and sharing of documents. Think before you print, a new green file format has arrived: WWF.