I have to admit, I’m personally thrilled to hear this latest bit of Bing news: the new search engine is now incorporating actual tweets into their search results. No longer do I have to find some Greasemonkey-powered workaround or rely on an IE add-on to see what’s being said on Twitter – it’s just baked into the search results themselves.

However, Bing isn’t indexing all of Twitter at this time. Instead, they’ve identified some of the “more prominent and prolific Twitterers” - only a few thousand people to begin with, actually.

When you search for one of these folks in relation to Twitter, you’ll see their latest tweets appear in the Bing results. For example, search for “Kara Swisher Twitter,” “Kara Swisher Tweets,” or even “@karaswisher”  and you’ll see something like this:

Only adding a small group of users to the index may be disappointing to some, but the Bing team says it’s just the first step toward using Twitter’s public API to bring tweets into search. They’re now looking for feedback as to how they should proceed in the future.

Here’s my suggestion: index it all! If someone actually takes the time to search for @sarahintampa using Bing, why not reveal my tweets? I also wouldn’t mind seeing a new vertical added to the top navigation specifically for Twitter…that would be really helpful when tracking a breaking story, for instance. But those are just my ideas. What are yours? Tell the Bing team here.

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Microsoft already has a strong Twitter presence with numerous teams maintaining accounts on the microblogging social network, but until now there wasn’t an overall account for the company as a whole. On Wednesday, though, that changed as @microsoft went live on Twitter. The account is maintained by four members of the corporate communications team and it currently looks like more of a feed of Microsoft-related news than an attempt to read and respond to incoming @ replies. (Although that hasn’t stopped a slew of folks from tweeting to @Microsoft).

Instead, if you’re looking for a little more personal interaction – or at the very least, more targeted news – you may be better off following one of these specific Microsoft-owned Twitter accounts:

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One of the most critical features needed to get people to switch over from one email account to another is the ability to still easily access email from their old accounts. Sometimes, this can be accomplished by forwarding the old account (if that’s an option of your webmail service), other times it can be done by import. Now (at last!), Windows Live Hotmail has added a feature that lets you import other email account into your Hotmail.

For users in the US, Canada, and Brazil, you can now import any POP-enabled email account – a list which happens to include Yahoo! Mail Plus, AOL Mail, and Gmail. (The feature was already available in the UK, France, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Germany).

To access this option, click on “Add an e-mail account” on the left side of you inbox. Type in the email address and password for the account you want to forward then click “Next.” Choose where you want the messages to go (for example, a separate folder instead of your inbox) and click “Save.”

In order for this to work, POP has to be turned on in the POP-enabled email service you’re adding. This is usually found in your webmail settings.

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In February of this year, Microsoft Research released a paper (PDF) about a new web browser they’re calling “Gazelle,” which is really less of a browser and more like an operating system. According to the paper, what makes Gazelle different than any other browsers out there today is how it’s able to exclusively control and mange the system’s resources.

Now, in a new article on Microsoft Research’s site, we get a little more insight about what exactly Gazelle can do.

One of the features of Gazelle is its ability to manage devices. Unlike with other browsers, where device management takes place (like accessing a webcam for instance), it’s done via plugin. In the Gazelle model, the browser kernel itself “protects principals from one another and from the host machine by exclusively managing access to computer resources, enforcing policies, handling interprincipal communications, and providing consistent, systematic access to computing devices.”

The kernel also exclusively manages the principles by placing them in a separate protection domain using an OS process. That way, if misbehaving code arises it only affects its own protection domain, leaving everything else including the kernel and host system intact.

Sadly for us, though, Gazelle is not a project that will develop into a workable prototype  - it’s just research. “I would like to see Web applications achieve function and quality parity with desktop apps,” says Helen J. Wang, senior researcher in he Systems and Networking group at Microsoft Research Redmond. “That’s the ultimate goal of this research.”

Ever since Bing’s launch, there’s been a lot of talk about which search engine is doing a better job. Can Bing compare to Google? Does it do a better job? Or does it do well with some queries and not others? If you’ve had trouble making up your mind about this, there’s a new site that can help you figure it all out. The site is called “Bing vs. Google,” and, like it sounds, it’s a comparison site that pits two sets of search results against each other. Like any other search engine, Bing vs. Google has a simple homepage with just a search box in the middle of the screen and a bit of text explaining what it’s all about. To use the site, all you have to do is enter in a query as usual and hit “search.”

The fun part, of course, is the search results page. Bing vs. Google shows the results in a split screen, bing on the left, Google on the right. Squashing the screens like this can lead to a bit overlapping text in some cases (see, for example, how the results overlap Google’s sponsored links in the image), but it’s still a good way to easily get side-by-side results.

Using the links at the top, you can change the layout of the page to a horizontal split, if you so desire, or you can switch off one engine entirely and show just the one set of results. Either way, if you were having trouble making up your mind (or just making the switch to a new default search provider!), Bing vs. Google can help you put things in perspective.

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Kodu, the new game that teaches kids (or anyone) the basics of programming in a visual environment, is getting closer to its public launch. On Sunday June 28th, the game was released into “Peer Review,” which means that the independent developers over at the XNA Creator’s Club will now be evaluating the game for stability, appropriate content, and copyright issues - just as they do with any other community-created game.

Assuming all goes well, after a certain number of developer sign off of the game, it will be made available for sale in the Xbox’s Community Games Channel. The absolute soonest this could happen is Tuesday the 30th, since it takes 48 hours after approval for a game to go live on the service.

If, on the other hand, the game has any problems or bugs that need to be corrected, it will obviously take longer to arrive. We hope that’s not the case! Fingers crossed! In any event, someone will update the Microsoft Research blog if any issues arise, so stay tuned.

Otherwise, log on to your Xbox later this week to (hopefully) try Kodu for yourself.

Sobees, creator of a .NET/WPF desktop app for social media junkies, has just launched a new version. This latest release adds Digg to the list of supported services which already includes Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr, as well as RSS feeds, too.  The Facebook integration has also been revamped to allow for the addition of the full Facebook stream – that means you can see the comments now, not just the updates themselves.

One of the things the aggregator is good for is tracking a various topic across the social web. Sobees even offers a few built-in modules for following popular subjects. New modules in this release (which are, by the way, strangely called “bDules” – I know, I don’t get, either) include MLB, NFL, Soccer, and Tennis.

Incidentally, “bDule” is also the name of another product by Sobees which is a single window application for tracking just Twitter and Facebook.

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