Bing, Microsoft’s play in the search market, has been with us for just over two years now. Although the division continues to lose money, Microsoft’s seemingly infinite marketing budget has seen their service steadily encroaching on arch-rival Google’s territory.
Bing has faced numerous accusations since launch that it is simply ripping off Google – right down to its search results – and it looks as if those throwing the accusations now have another reason to do so. Today Microsoft have launched a new app for their Windows Phone 7 operating system called “We’re In”, which on the surface seems to be Microsoft’s interpretation of Google’s Latitude service, which allows you to share your location with friends in real-time via your smartphone.
Microsoft has differentiated their product somewhat – location sharing is time-sensitive and can be done with just a phone number as the invites are sent via SMS. There is also a mobile browser version for those people not using Windows Phone 7. A post on the Bing blog explains the service thus:
“We’re In makes organizing get- together’s, carpooling and trying to find people in a crowd a breeze. Any time you want to see where your friends are—We’re In can help you. It’s simple, invite your friends, and when they join, they’ll see your location and you’ll see theirs. When the invite expires, so does the shared location – no complicated process to worry about.”
Quite apart from the similarities to Google Latitude, We’re In also borrows a lot of functionality from cross-platform location sharing service Glympse, right down to the blog title (“Share your where”).
The difficult job for Microsoft now is convincing people they should download and use We’re In over its competitors – Glympse is sailing towards 1,000,000 downloads on Android, and Google Maps – which includes Latitude – is the most-downloaded item on the entire Android Market with between 100m and 500m users.
For the time being We’re In is WP7-only and US-only, so we can’t see business being too brisk as Microsoft’s mobile OS accounts for just 1% of the smartphone market according to research firm Canalys.
