Social Networking

This week we talk about the social strategies Microsoft is using to connect and empower its almost 100,000 employees. We sit down with Chris Slemp, a Program Manager overseeing a number of these efforts. We’ll talk about his experience, interesting collaborations tools, and communication platforms…

Today I spotted a very cool project over at Microsoft’s FUSE Labs called SocialGadgets. Billed as a “Visual exploration of Twitter topics”, SocialGadgets is a set of embeddable widgets that allows you to visualise data from Twitter in real-time. Want to see who’s getting talked about right now?…

Have you ever been happily driving down the road, listening to your favourite tunes, only to have your karma shattered by a careless driver cutting you up or flashing you to get out of the way? If you’re anything like me, you’ll shout and scream or gesticulate wildly and for what reason? To…

ScholarLynk is a new tool for scientists and other researchers which Microsoft Research is unveiling this week at ECDL, the European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. The project has roots in Lewis Shepherd’s 2008 project called “Research Desktop” which combined…

Silverlight-based social networking application Seesmic has just launched its highly anticipated plugin platform which transforms the formerly Twitter-only app to a platform for the larger social Web, and real-time news. The platform lets you add in plugins of your choosing to the desktop…

With the recent refresh of the Windows Live Essentials beta, Windows Live Messenger has been updated to now support Facebook chat in addition to its standard IM service. This new feature further enhances the IM client software, which is already more of a social dashboard than a simple chat…

At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Microsoft announced a new social aggregator called Spindex, a project built by FUSE Labs, the folks behind the Outlook Social Connector, Bing Twitter Maps and Docs for Facebook. With Spindex, now available as an early technical preview, your social streams from…

At the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam, the Windows Live Messenger team announced “Messenger Connect,” a brand-new collection of APIs for Windows Live Messenger. The Messenger Connect API actually ties together APIs that have been around for awhile, including the Windows Live ID, Contacts API,…

At this week’s MIX10 conference, Seesmic showed off their new Silverlight-powered Twitter applications, one a desktop app and the other a mobile app designed for Windows Phone 7 Series devices. A prototype of the cross-platform desktop client, which is similar to the current "Seesmic for…

Playfire, a social network for gamers, lets you track your scores and rankings on services like Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PSP, and others while also engaging in discussions with fellow gamers, viewing game-related content like photos and videos, building your own virtual game collection, and more.…