A story about social media
Today I was fortunate to spend 30 minutes talking to the Social Media Leadership Forum. I themed my talk around how we create, consume and analyse content online. Here’s a breakdown of the technologies I talked about.
Bing Twitter Maps – http://www.bing.com/twitter/maps
See tweets in the context of a map and search for a specific subject, place or person to quickly see what is happening anywhere via Twitter.
Montage – http://mymontage.com
Montage is a shareable, personal, visual album of the web. You are able to design your personal Montage around a topic by adding content that pulls information from a variety of sources including, RSS feeds, Twitter, Bing News, YouTube, video and Bing Images.
You can browse a gallery of other people’s Montages (I’m a little unsure of the plural and happy to stand corrected) over here: http://montage.cloudapp.net/Gallery
The Archivist – http://archivist.visitmix.com/
The Archivist is a service that uses the Twitter Search API to find, archive and analyse tweets. There are two versions available, a web service: http://archivist.visitmix.com/ and a desktop application http://visitmix.com/labs/archivist-desktop/ – one advantage of the desktop version is that you can export tweets to Excel for further analysis.
Social Gadgets – http://designer.socialgadgets.fuselabs.com/?template=A
Dynamic visualizations of real-time Twitter data that you can embed on your site or blog.
Spindex – http://spindex.cloudapp.net/
Connect to Facebook, Twitter, RSS and Bing. It lets you find out more about the topics that your friends and feeds are talking about in one click – so you can jump into the conversation.
Project Emporia – http://www.projectemporia.com/
It sifts through ever-evolving news streams to identify hot news stories, categorizes them into topic areas and ranks them, and then presents them to you in a friendly and easy-to-use UI. With Project Emporia you get relevant stories on topics of your choice. Available as a web service and as an application for Windows Phone 7
Microsoft FUSE Labs
A lot of the links above come from Microsoft FUSE Labs, they release social media based products regularly and often without the fanfare they deserve: http://fuse.microsoft.com/ I highly recommend checking in regularly to see what’s new, or follow them on Twitter @fuselabs.
I mentioned very briefly Vannevar Bush, you can find more information on him at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush). It is really worth finding some time to read his paper titled, As We May Think, published in 1945.
Finally, for some future inspiration, check out the following videos:
LightSpace
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=139046
Microsoft Office Labs – Vision 2019