Bing Adds Friend-Tagging To Social Sidebar

Bing has just announced a small tweak to how its Social Sidebar functions — but it’s one that overcomes one of the Sidebar’s true limitations.

The change is this: When using the Social Sidebar, you can now tag up to five Facebook friends with whom you want to share your search results. Before this change, the Sidebar would automatically show a few connections under the “Friends Who Might Know” or “People Who Know” tabs. But you were limited to notifying/asking those suggestions, or to asking all of your friends at once via the “Ask Friends” feature. And that was hit and miss, because there’s no guarantee that Facebook would show your post to the people you wanted to see it.

You can now go beyond the suggestions and avoid having to ask all of your friends by using the “Choose friends to notify” tool.

The new tool isn’t live for me at the moment, but Bing says it has begun rolling out on Bing.com. Stefan Weitz, Bing Director, shows off the new feature in this video.