social web

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…

In October, Bing received access to the Twitter “firehose” and launched a specialized Twitter search site at bing.com/twitter. Now, a new search portal is launching, Bing Social Search, available at bing.com/social, and it will feature both Twitter posts and publicly available Facebook posts too.…

Last month, we told you about Fizzik, a new “social” web browser designed for keeping up with news, video and social media. Web services like .NET and WPF are used in the software which is also built on top of Internet Explorer. At the time of the original announcement, the browser was not yet…

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,…

Sobees, the company known for their desktop and web-based social media tools, has just launched a new real-time search platform powered by Silverlight and running on Windows Azure. The new platform lets you search the real-time web including images, news, and videos. It pulls from sites like…

A company called Digital Outlook has developed a social media toolkit that will allow Xbox gamers to share their personalized, customized Xbox avatar creations on various social networking sites including Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Live Spaces, and more. The new toolkit will also allow those avatars…

[Stay tuned, Laura Foy is meeting with these folks and will have a video soon.] Microsoft Research will be debuting a prototype called Social Desktop at the annual TechFest event being held next week. This software offers a new take on cloud computing, blending the PC and the web in a completely…

8hands is a desktop client for Windows users that lets you track several social networking platforms including MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. In a way, it’s sort of like FriendFeed without the need to set up an account – it just tracks your friends across the social web after you…

The Live Labs team has just released a new project, Political Streams, and just in time as the U.S. Presidential election draws near. The site mines social media from across the internet, including blogs, newsgroups, and web sites, in order to track what stories are popular and if that popularity…