Social web

This is cool: Microsoft project codename “Social Analytics”

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Microsoft project codename “Social Analytics” is one nice beta project! Quoting from it’s site –

“it is aimed at developers who want to integrate social web information into business applications”

But the KEY here is that it allows you to integrate FILTERED social web information into your business applications. Today, you could go ahead – grab a twitter stream data – embed it in your application but guess what? In most cases, it’s too much information. Too much information means, that it’s very difficult for business-folks to take actions by analyzing these truckloads of information. And so:

even though we are data-rich – we are information (insight) poor.

My point being, that tons of information PRODUCED by [customers, partners, critics, employees..] GATHERED from [Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Blogs…] is NOT useful in it’s raw form. To take actions based on all these data-points – what we need is a way to categorize data (filter data) which would help the decision maker in seeing only SMALL part of data-set he/she needs for performing that particular analysis.

Let’s take an example:

A business-decision-maker wants to see “All twitter-users who have posted positive reviews about Windows 8 Design and User Experience”

How would you solve it?

Think.

Imagine.

Easy? hard?

Thinking of writing your own Sentiment Analyzer? awesome, & Good Luck!

Any-who, may be you know it’s not straight-forward to answer the above question using raw twitter data.

But here’s the thing you could use Third-party tools to solve the problem. Don’t get me wrong, I am not asking you to ignore them. But here’s how Microsoft Social Analytics helped me solve the above problem:

social analysis windows 8 design and user experience

Here’s how I FILTERED the data: (It’s a thing called Social Analytic Engagement client) microsoft social analytics filter data enagagement client

And as you can see there are more than one ways you can slice/filter your data to provide a view that is best suited for a particular analysis assignment.

Please note:

1. Currently in beta: only two data-sets are available i.e. Bill Gates & Windows 8.

2. Apart from this nicely designed web based engagement tool, you can integrate the information into applications using Social Analytics API.

Conclusion:

Check out Microsoft Codename “Social Analytics”! Today, it’s here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlazurelabs/labs/socialanalytics.aspx (you’ll need an invite to try out social analytics.