Microsoft showed off two social-networking projects at TechFest on Tuesday that show that the company wants to do more in this area than just invest in Facebook.
One project, known as Salsa, aims to use one’s corporate data to piece together their social network, or at least their network of co-workers. In its current form, the software is a plug-in to Outlook that shows social-networking information such as a photo and profile next to an incoming e-mail message. The program also pieces together a list of “friends” based on e-mail frequency and other data.
“When you start looking there is a surprising amount of information that gets locked in e-mail,” said Shane Williams, one of the Microsoft Research team that worked on Salsa.
Lili Cheng, the Microsoft veteran who heads the social-computing team at Microsoft Research, said that part of the power of Salsa is simply putting a human face on e-mail. She said her own use of the site has borne out the power of that, noting it is harder to argue with a colleague when she sees a picture of them with their cute kid or pet.
“E-mail can be very dehumanizing,” Cheng said.
Cheng said that in addition to deploying it inside Microsoft, she’d like to see how Salsa works within one or two other large companies to see if it is more broadly useful.
In another project from Cheng’s group, known as C2, Microsoft researchers have created a Windows application that pieces together contact data from a variety of social-networking sites. For the purposes of Tuesday’s demonstration, the researchers focused on Windows Live Spaces and Facebook. Researcher Steve Ickman said he chose those two because they represent among the most open (Spaces) and closed (Facebook) when it comes to data sharing.
Although Facebook is notoriously restrictive when it comes to members scraping their data, Ickman said that he believes he was able to stay within Facebook’s terms of service by grabbing only approved data from one’s own contacts and not caching the information long-term. “It’s totally legal, at least at this point.”
The project is more of a technology demonstration than anything geared toward a specific product, Ickman said, adding that he hoped it would demonstrate to the product teams that they can be more ambitious. “We tend to cancel things because they are too hard,” he said.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Internet, Microsoft, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
Facebook is planning on allowing users to add activities from third party social networking site directly into their Facebook news feed, we’ve confirmed. The goal is to centralize all that activity in one place.
Third parties can already integrate directly today via the Facebook API, Beacon and the Facebook Platform, but adoption from these companies, which are indirectly also competing with Facebook, has been slow. Now, users can add the content stream directly. Users simply tell Facebook what third party services they use the most, along with their credentials or public feed for the site. The content stream is then pulled into your Facebook News Feed.
What this means: in your friends news feed, you may start to see more content from Flickr, Twitter, Digg and other third party services. This competes directly with what a number of startups are doing – namely FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse and the more recently launched Iminta.
This is certainly an opening up of Facebook. And given that so many tens of millions of users spend so much time on the site already, it could remove the wind from the FriendFeed/Plaxo sails.
But don’t expect to see a RSS feed or widgets showing what you or your friends are up to any time soon. The data feeds that Facebook opened up last year do not extend to the News Feed. And from what we hear, Facebook hasn’t made a decision to open it up yet. Until they do, there is still plenty of breathing room for competitors.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Facebook, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
The on-again, off-again talks to merge two ultra-fast nonprofit Internet networks have ended again — for good this time, it appears.
Internet2 and National LambdaRail serve many of the nation’s universities and research institutions by offering fast Internet connections that physicists, astronomers and other researchers need to exchange large amounts of data.
The two next-generation networks began with separate missions, but their technologies and services converged over the years. And Jeff Lehman, chairman of Internet2′s board, said their clients backed the merger because the organizations largely served the same community.
Talks resumed this year, and a committee with top leaders from each network worked out a compromise in August.
Internet2′s board approved it, despite misgivings by some of its board members, but LambdaRail’s board sought more concessions. And last week, both sides called it quits.
“A lot of us are disappointed,” said Internet2′s Lehman, a member of the merger committee. “We knew it was a challenge, and we were hopeful that we would find a way to get to the end this time.”
Many LambdaRail participants felt they had invested in the system and wanted greater returns, Lehman said. He said Internet2 offered as much financial benefits as it could.
LambdaRail Chairman Erv Blythe, in a statement, described his organization as an atypical nonprofit, one that tracked how much individual members gave and received. He said LambdaRail needed additional concessions to satisfy its obligations to contributing members.
“Under the circumstances, we agree that our respective organizations have no choice but to move forward independently,” Lehman and Blythe said in a joint statement.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Hardware, Internet | 1 Comment »
