Microsoft Codename "Social Analytics"

Microsoft Codename "Social Analytics" - Lab Phase is Complete

Social Analytics Team — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 22:23:00 GMT

The Microsoft Codename "Social Analytics" lab phase is complete.

Here is what we wanted to learn from this lab:

How useful do customers find this scenario?
API prioritization: We wanted to understand which features developers needed to implement first and how easy it is to implement these (for example, content
item display, how to modify filters, etc.).
API usability: Were our APIs hard to use, easy to use, consistent with existing methods, or did they add to the concept count?

We have received a lot of useful feedback which will shape our future direction. We would like to thank everybody who participated for their valuable feedback!

Lab Bonus! Enhanced Sentiment Analysis for Twitter from Microsoft Research

Social Analytics Team — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:30:00 GMT

What’s new?

In this release, we enhanced our sentiment software by upgrading to the latest version of code from the same Microsoft Research team we used in prior releases. The major improvement in this version of their code is a new classifier specifically trained on Tweets. The sentiment analysis code we used in prior releases from Microsoft Research was trained on short sentences and paragraphs. We predict that the accuracy of sentiment analysis will improve in Social Analytics by using the classifier trained specifically on tweets for Twitter content items. We will continue to use the sentence and paragraph classifiers on all other content.

The tweet classifier was trained on nearly 4 million tweets from over a year’s worth of English Twitter data. It is based on a study of how people express their moods on Twitter with mood-indicating hashtags. We mapped over 150 different mood-bearing hashtags to positive and negative affect, and used the hashtags as a training signal to learn which words and word pairs in a tweet are highly correlated with positive or negative affect.

How we use the sentiment software in Social Analytics

We use the MSR sentiment software to assess the tone of all content items as part of our enrichment process. When the assessment is complete we store both that ranking and the reliability of that assessment the these 2 fields respectively; CalculatedToneID and ToneReliability. Our API and sample client Silverlight UI will expose content item as either positive or negative if the sentiment engine scores the item with a reliability percentage over a certain threshold we determine.

Here is a simple explanation of the three fields related to sentiment in the ContentItem table:

Field	Description
CalculatedToneID	The sentiment (or tone) of the content item as determined by the sentiment software: 3 = Neutral 5 = Positive 6 =Negative
ToneReliability	The reliability of the tone calculation as determined by the sentiment software. The reliability thresholds are currently 80% for positive sentiment and 90% for negative sentiment. If we’re below the reliability threshold, the CalculatedToneId will be set to neutral.
ToneID	If a user sets the sentiment manually in our UI or thru an API call, the tone they set is stored in this field. If ToneID is set, we show ToneID rather than CalculatedToneID in the UI and return it in API calls.

For more details on this Microsoft Research project, check out http://research.microsoft.com/tweetaffect !

Enhanced Analytics and Sentiment Analysis Arrive in Social Analytics

Social Analytics Team — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:06:00 GMT

We are proud to announce an update to the Microsoft Codename “Social Analytics” Lab. This update builds on the services we announced in October by providing the following new capabilities:

Enhanced analytics in our API
Sample usage of the enhanced analytics in the Engagement Client - 5 new analytic widgets
Improved sentiment analysis for Tweets

1. Enhanced Analytics:

Our existing API now provides richer analytics views of social data. This makes it easier to find top conversations, contributors, keywords and sources related to any filter with a simple ODATA query and returns conversations related to these calculations to your application.

Here’s a sample* ODATA query returning the top 5 keywords found in a filter for the past 7 days:

https://api.datamarket.azure.com/Vancouver/VancouverBillGates/GetTopKeywords?TimeIntervalSize='day'&TimeIntervalCount=7&TimeIntervalEnd=&FilterId=4&ResultsLimitTo=5

You can start investigating the details of the API by going to this link. If you are new to Social Analytics, check out our API overview here.

* Note: You will need to use your existing credentials for the lab to use this sample code. (Look at the API section here for details)

2. New Analytics Widgets in the Engagement Client:

See the new enhanced analytics in use in our sample Silverlight UI – the Engagement Client. We built these 5 analytic widgets using the new analytic enhancements to our API. These widgets provide the following analytic views for any filter:

Top Conversations
Top Contributors
Top Keywords
Volume
Sources

Here's an illustration of the new analytics in the sample Silverlight client:

3. Improved Sentiment Analysis for Tweets

In this release, we snuck in a little bonus! We updated the sentiment engine with minor enhancements to improve the analysis of sentiment in Tweets.

That's what's new in this release! In a few short months, we've made major progress on this experimental cloud service.

Now it's time for you to try the updated lab and let us know what you think. We're already working on the top feature request from our fall release - giving you the ability to define your own topics. We plan on making that functionality part of a future release.

For those new to this Lab, please check out our initial blog post for an overview of Microsoft Codename "Social Analytics". Here are some additional links from that post for your convenience:

Get started today
Visit our official homepage and Connect Site for more information
Connect with us in our forums
Stay tuned to our product blog for future updates

Finding Top Handles

Social Analytics Team — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:48:00 GMT

This post is a continuation of a series of posts that provides details on how the Entities can be used to accomplish some basic scenarios in the Social Analytics lab.

In this scenario we’ll look at identifying top participants for one of the lab datasets. To accomplish this, we need on two Entities in our dataset (pictured below):

Using these two entities we can discover who is most active in the conversations included in our dataset.

Handles

Handles are the primary element of a person’s identity for a site. You may have discovered (as mentioned in our “Boo” post) the ability to open a column in the Engagement Client for a person’s conversation. Handle is the entity used to track all content items for a person. The Bill Gates lab is already tracking over 199,000 handles.

Here’s a sampling of some handles from the Bill Gates slice:

HandleReferenceEntities

We look for references to a handle in every content item that is processed for a dataset. In the Bill Gates dataset, we can find references to handles as authors and as mentions:

Although we process posts as an individual Content Items, our focus in Social Analytics is in aggregates at the Thread Level and above, which is why we attach MessageThreadId to just about everywhere that we use ContentItemId.

Finding the top Handles

With these two entities, we can easily find the top participants in the Bill Gates dataset over the last 7 days. We’ll use the following LINQ statement in LINQPad:

 (
 from h in Handles.Expand("HandleReferences").AsEnumerable()
 where 
 h.HandleReferences.Max(hr => hr.LastUpdatedOn) > DateTime.Now.AddDays(-7)
 orderby h.HandleReferences.Count descending
 select new
 {
 h.Id
 ,h.Name
 ,References = h.HandleReferences.Count,
 h.ProfileUrl,
 LastReference = h.HandleReferences.Max(hr => hr.LastUpdatedOn)
 }
 ).Take(5)

The results:

This basic analytic provide a good starting point to understand your top participants and know who you might want to build relationships and who you might want to ignore as noise that’s not relevant to your interests.

Check out our next blog post to find out more about what you can do with the entities in the Social Analytics Lab.

Finding Top Message Threads for a Filter

Social Analytics Team — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 21:27:00 GMT

This is the second post in a series where we explore Entities in the Social Analytics Lab API. Through this series of posts, we will provide details on how the Entities can be used to accomplish some basic scenarios in the Social Analytics lab.

In this scenario we’ll look at identifying top threads for one of the lab datasets. To accomplish this, you will need three Entities in our API (pictured below):

Filters

Filters are a central concept in storing and retrieving data in the Social Analytics Lab. You could think of the set of filters as a list of topics available in an Social Analytics Instance. For example, the Windows 8 lab includes the following filters:

Id	Name
1	DataAcquisition: Windows 8
2	DataAcquisition: Windows 8 on Twitter
3	DataAcquisition: Windows 8 on YouTube
4	Subscription Filter for @g_win8slice
6	Windows 8 and Tablet PCs
7	Windows 8
8	Non-Twitter
10	Windows 8 on Facebook
11	Windows 8 and Applications
12	Windows 8 Design and User Experience
13	Windows 8 and Applications 2

Notice that three of the Filters are labeled as Data Acquisition Filters. Filters can control what activity from social media channels is tracked in an instance of Social Analytics or it can be simply a materialized view over the social data tracked in an instance. With our permissions model for filter definitions, control over what Social Data is tracked in an instance can be controlled while giving many users permissions to define filters that are views over the data.

MessageThreads

We define a MessageThread as a post and all of its replies within a channel. MessageThreads are the primary unit of activity we use to track social channel activity. If you examine the MessageThreads entity, you’ll find a collection of measures described an aggregated view of the thread, including:

Replies
Answers
Likes
Retweets
IsQuestion
IsAnswered
PositiveSentiment
NegativeSentiment

The Replies field is a total of all replies of all types in the thread, so you don’t want to sum Replies and Answers etc., or you’ll be double-counting.

FilterResultCaches

FilterResultCaches represents what MessageThreads relate to all filters, and is one of the most useful Entities for analyzing Social Analytics data. Using the following LINQ Query in LinqPad:

(
 from f in FilterResultCaches
 orderby f.MessageThread.Replies descending
 where f.FilterId == 6
 && f.MessageThread.Replies > 1
 && f.LastUpdatedOn > DateTime.Now.AddDays(-7)
 select new
 {
 f.MessageThread.Replies,
 f.Site.Name,
 f.MessageThread.PositiveSentiment,
 f.MessageThread.NegativeSentiment,
 f.MessageThread.LastReplyContentItem.Title,
 f.MessageThread.LastReplyContentItem.HtmlUrl,
 }
).Take(10)

we can find the Messagethreads with the most replies during the last 7 days in the “Windows 8 and Tablet PCs” filter:

Replies	Name	PositiveSentiment	NegativeSentiment	Title	HtmlUrl
126	twitter.com	0	0	RT @TheNextWeb: If the Kindle Fire nearly runs Windows 8, why do we need quad-core Android tablets? http://t.co/fcXyxiU1 by @alex on @TN ...	http://twitter.com/RenoYuuki/statuses/138211182040449024
33	twitter.com	0	0	RT @blogtweetz: Nokia Tablet To Debut in Summer 2012 - Powered By Windows 8 ! http://t.co/EniexIKY via @Dazeinfo	http://twitter.com/epremierleague/statuses/138931098318155776
13	twitter.com	0	0	RT @9to5mac: How well does Mac OSX run on Samsung’s Windows 8 Tablet? [Video] http://t.co/tvOJVmSj	http://twitter.com/carlst3/statuses/139378162495791106
7	twitter.com	0	0	RT @Indiferencia: Nokia lanzará tablet con Windows 8 en junio de 2012 http://t.co/54Wf3Rza	http://twitter.com/endamo/statuses/138029411483131905
6	twitter.com	0	0	RT @Entiendelas: Nokia lanzará tablet con Windows 8 en junio de 2012 http://t.co/bMvT7gXr	http://twitter.com/Lacangri1412/statuses/137750579417055232
6	twitter.com	0	0	RT @dehaaspeter: BCG: Windows tablet populairder dan iPad van Apple : http://t.co/P4GedXkY #windows8	http://twitter.com/OscarMinkenberg/statuses/139273712657637376
5	twitter.com	0	0	RT @OfficeTH: โอ้วว้าว...!Win8 Tablet บน Nokia จะเฝ้ารออออ!!! http://t.co/4lFOjLmO	http://twitter.com/opal_monkey/statuses/138607317817114624
4	twitter.com	0	0	RT @LeaNoticias: Nokia lanzará tablet con Windows 8 en junio de 2012 http://t.co/DjOAGG9k	http://twitter.com/daichu_/statuses/138098502550040576
4	twitter.com	1	0	RT @Indiferencia: Nokia lanzará tablet con Windows 8 en junio de 2012 http://t.co/54Wf3Rza	http://twitter.com/arknglzintetico/statuses/138627023793954817
4	twitter.com	0	0	RT @freddier: Tablet Samsung con Windows 8 [pic] http://t.co/cyENejTk #techdayschile	http://twitter.com/GustavoRiveraMX/statuses/138723108952612864

The results include our calculated Positive and Negative Sentiment. The values indicate the number of content items in the MessageThread with 80% or more confidence that the tone is either positive or negative.

Check out our next blog post to find out more about what you can do with the entities in the Social Analytics Lab.

Also, please let us know what questions you have or other interesting discoveries you find in the labs.

Finding Top Keywords with the Social Analytics API

Social Analytics Team — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:28:00 GMT

There are over 50 Entities and Service Operations available in the Social Analytics Lab API. Over the next few posts we will provide details on how the Entities can be used to accomplish some basic scenarios in the Social Analytics lab.

The first scenario we’ll look at identifies top keywords for one of the lab datasets. To accomplish this, you only need two Entities in our API (pictured below):

Keywords

The Keywords entity includes every keyword that has been defined or observed by our curation processes. After two weeks of activity on the Bill Gates Lab, we already have an inventory of over 10,000 keywords. New keywords observed in the Social Stream are marked as New. These new keywords are useful to consider when defining filters (coming in a future version) to curate relevant conversations.

With the following LINQ Statement in LINQPad, we can get a sample of the active keywords in the Bill Gates Lab:

 (
 from k in Keywords
 where k.ItemStatusId == 10 //Active
 select new
 {
 k.Name,
 }
 ).Take(10)

Name

Vaccinations

Stanford

Philanthropic

Germany

BillGates

Global Health

Bill Clinton

UN Foundation

GatesFoundation

March of Dimes

KeywordReferenceEntities

KeywordReferenceEntities are the record of what Keywords are referenced in Content Items and Message Threads. In our taxonomy, a Content Item is a post of any kind, ranging from gestures such as Facebook likes to a Tweet to a Blog Post. A Message Thread is a summary of an original post in a feed and all responses to that post in the same feed.

With the following LINQ Statement in LINQPad, we can get a sample of Keyword References:

 (
 from k in KeywordReferenceEntities
 select new
 {
 KeywordName = k.Keyword.Name,
 k.MessageThread.LastReplyContentItem.Title,
 k.MessageThread.LastReplyContentItem.HtmlUrl,
 }
 ).Take(10)

KeywordName	Title	HtmlUrl
Bill Gates	"Ô Bill Gates, vamos dar um jeito na internet aqui do Brasil, hein?" http://t.co/flCjtGrx	http://twitter.com/13_levi/statuses/126703589409304576
Bill Gates	Em palestra paga por um banco americano Lula se supera: “Sem um dedo, fiz mais que Bill Gates e Steve Jobs”.	http://twitter.com/Thais_Grimald/statuses/126703689510551552
Bill Gates	Rapaz......Isso não era pra hoje não viu....Até agora sem almoçar! Se pudesse, mandava Bill Gates para junto de Jobs!	http://twitter.com/mbatistasilva/statuses/126703767683993600
Bill Gates	RT @GuidoFawkes: Nobody loves Bill Gates, but if he has funded a Malaria vaccine, it makes up for everything and is kind of more signifi ...	http://twitter.com/TadasLabudis/statuses/128649702337032192
Bill Gates	RT @GuidoFawkes: Nobody loves Bill Gates, but if he has funded a Malaria vaccine, it makes up for everything and is kind of more signifi ...	http://twitter.com/TadasLabudis/statuses/128649702337032192
BillGates	BillGates Bill Gates For those of us lucky enough to get to work with Steve, it’s been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely.	http://twitter.com/Carolina_S_O/statuses/126704102003572736
Bill Gates	BillGates Bill Gates For those of us lucky enough to get to work with Steve, it’s been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely.	http://twitter.com/Carolina_S_O/statuses/126704102003572736
endmalaria	RT @PATHtweets: Blog: Read commentary on 2011 @gatesfoundation Malaria Summit from our Malaria Control Program team. http://t.co/DSdlUoO ...	http://twitter.com/EVERY_ONE_CAN/statuses/126704433638805504
GatesFoundation	RT @PATHtweets: Blog: Read commentary on 2011 @gatesfoundation Malaria Summit from our Malaria Control Program team. http://t.co/DSdlUoO ...	http://twitter.com/EVERY_ONE_CAN/statuses/126704433638805504
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Malaria Forum	Using information systems to track a killer parasite	http://macepadiary.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/using-information-systems-to-track-a-killer-parasite/

Top Keywords for the Last Week

Using these two Entities together, we can calculate the top 5 Keywords referenced in the last week for Bill Gates. Here’s the code:

 (
 from k in Keywords.Expand("KeywordReferences").AsEnumerable()
 where k.ItemStatusId == 10
 && k.KeywordReferences.Max(kr => kr.LastUpdatedOn) > DateTime.Now.AddDays(-7)
 orderby k.KeywordReferences.Count descending
 select new
 {
 k.Id,
 k.Name,
 References = k.KeywordReferences.Count
 }
 ).Take(5)

and the results:

Id	Name	References
9acbefab-156f-4039-98b9-0a56c2d359d6	Global Health	108
0db05e2f-233f-4155-93db-01a07c693017	philanthropic	102
d268a214-0033-4f89-b297-051f2fdf7029	Germany	91
f41b31fb-63ce-47bc-ab72-016a4e43803a	Stanford	68
a65d7774-59d7-42d5-a224-013b226cdcae	Vaccinations	35

Check out our blog later this week to find out more about what you can do with the entities in the Social Analytics Lab.

Also, please let us know what questions you have or other interesting discoveries you find in the labs.

Bill Gates and Education: What are people saying?

Social Analytics Team — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 22:39:00 GMT

After spending last week speaking with world leaders at the G20 Summit, Bill Gates kicked off this week by speaking with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria about education reform. We thought we’d check in with the Social Analytics Engagement Client to see how people are currently talking about Bill's views on education.

Starting with the most active conversations

Jumping into the stream of real-time content can be overwhelming, so we decided to start viewing the most active conversations using an Analytics Column for the “Bill Gates and Education” filter. This gives us a view of conversations with the most replies and retweets over the past 24 hours.

@FareedZakaria’s tweet about improving teacher quality looks like it struck a nerve because there are 87 replies, so we decided to drill into that conversation by clicking on the .

Browsing through the retweets and replies shows a wide variety of opinions on how to improve education, here’s a sample of what we found:

Jumping into the Real-time Stream

After spending some time scrolling through the conversation that @FareedZakaria started, we decided to see what’s trending right now by creating a new Filter Column for the “Bill Gates and Education” filter. This column is sorted chronologically, so we see the most recent posts first, rather than the most active conversations. This view shows us that the How Bill Gates throws his money around in education post from Washington Post’s education blog is getting a fair amount of pass-along via Twitter:

This is just one example of how the Microsoft Codename “Social Analytics” Engagement Client can be used to see who is saying what about a particular topic. If you want to try it for yourself, we have set up filters for the following subtopics for Bill Gates:

Bill Gates and Education
Bill Gates and Malaria
Bill Gates and Technology
Bill Gates and Microsoft

If you are looking for more information on using the Engagement Client, be sure to read Boo! Little Surprises in the Engagement Client, then dig in and let us know what you find in our forum.

Boo! Little Surprises in the Engagement Client

Social Analytics Team — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 16:56:00 GMT

Happy Halloween! There are many features in the Engagement Client that you can explore on your own by clicking all the controls or by reading the "Engagement Client Quick Start Guide". Some controls are visible all the time and some are cleverly exposed when you roll your mouse over a post. Here are a few features that may not be as obvious as others which we think you will find useful:

Open Conversation in a New Column
Tweet
Go to Post
Expand & Collapse Column
Dismiss Filter Header

Let's take a look at these!

Open Conversation: This is one of our team's favorite features. On each post, you'll see a conversation icon; it looks the bubble with words over a cartoon character's head. If you click on that icon, a new column will open to the right in the Engagement Client. The column will be populated with all the posts, replies, comments, tweets, retweets and links associated with that conversation. If you see a single bubble icon, that means the conversation is one thread (a single post with all its replies & comments). If you see a double bubble icon, that means the conversation spans multiple channels (multiple posts across multiple channels tied together by a link to the same URL.)

This feature exposes one of the key components of "Social Analytics" which is the algorithm we've designed which ties a conversation together regardless of how many channels it spans or how many people participate in it.

Tweet: You can tweet, retweet, and reply to a tweet making it simple for you to not only find, but also participate in conversations from within the Engagement Client. The "Tweet" and "Register Account" controls are along the top of the Engagement Client main screen. The first time you tweet, you will be prompted to register your Twitter account with us. Our future plans include expanding our platform reach to Facebook and LinkedIn.

"Social Analytics" uses the standard Twitter APIs to enable you to register your Twitter account and tweet right from within the Engagement Client. For your security and protection, we use OAUTH V2 so that we never store your twitter password in our application.

Go to Post: On the top right corner of each post, you'll see an icon representing the channel or source where the post originated. By clicking on the icon, a new window will open in your browser and it will take you to the post directly at its source. This is particularly helpful for blog posts that you may want to read in full.

Expand & Collapse Column: You can make any column double-wide by clicking on the expand column control at the top of the column. If you open an "Analytics Column" you will notice that the default column size for it is double-wide. Clicking the control again resets the column size to single-wide.

Close Filter Selection: You can get more valuable real estate for viewing posts by clicking on the "Close Filter Selection" control at the top of the column. We built this feature at the request of one of our early adopter customers to increase the number of posts they could view. The filter header allows you to change filters in your column. If you want to see filter headers again, you can click on the "Show Filter Setting" control to get the filter selector back on the top of the column. Here are both controls:

AND

Those are a few Halloween treats for you! We are eager for your feedback. Tell us what you think by posting comments to this blog or to our forum. We will use your feedback to guide the future direction of "Social Analytics".

Getting Access to the Social Analytics Lab

Social Analytics Team — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 21:29:00 GMT

Are you curious about Microsoft Codename “Social Analytics?" Are you wondering how to get started? The Social Analytics Lab and its documentation (on Social Analytics Connect) are available and ready to help you, as is our Social Analytics Forum. Just go to the Social Analytics Lab to register for the lab and follow the instructions there. In case you want to bypass the lab page, just click on this shortcut.

After you fill out and submit the access request form, we will send you an e-mail with detailed instructions. Today you'll find the process relatively complicated, but we will continue to make improvements over time as we move toward the goal of enabling "one-click" access to rich social analytics.

Here's a sample of what you'll hear from us with some commentary <in-line>.

MICROSOFT

CODENAME “SOCIAL ANALYTICS”

Thank you for signing up for Microsoft Codename “Social Analytics.”

To start using Social Analytics data, visit https://Win8.social.azure.com and use your invitation code: xxxxxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxx.

<"Social Analytics" is a cloud based service hosted in Windows Azure. The invitation code provides your Windows LiveID with access to the Windows Azure service. Enter it the first time you go to https://Win8.social.azure.com (or https://BillGates.social.azure.com for the Bill Gates data).>

After entering your information and accepting the Terms of Use, you will have two ways to interact with social media data about Windows 8:

Browsing Real-time Social Analytics Data

We recommend familiarizing yourself with Social Analytics data via our web-based Engagement Client, which shows a real-time stream of social media content about Windows 8. After logging in, select “Engagement Client” in the top navigation menu. You can find information about using the Engagement Client here.

Using Social Analytics API

When you are ready to start using the Social Analytics API with data about Windows 8, start with the following steps:

1. Get your account key here. <We provide programmatic access to Social Analytics data through Windows Azure DataMarket. This step provides you with the secret (account key) linking your LiveID to the Windows 8 data>

2. Copy your account key to use in LinqPad, PowerPivot or Visual Studio.

3. Review instructions for using LinqPad, PowerPivot or C# to access your dataset <We want you to be able to use the API as part of your usual development process. Let us know what we can do to make it simpler and easier for you to achieve your social web integration goals.>

Note: You may see an “Explore this Dataset” option on the DataMarket offer page. This explorer is not compatible with the Social Analytics source and should not be used to explore the data.

For additional information, you can read the full API documentation.

Additional Resources

Here are some other links that you may find useful:

That's basically it!

If you click on one these URLs and don’t have access, go to this "shortcut" to request access.

Play with the lab. Enjoy!

Announcing Microsoft Codename "Social Analytics" Lab

Social Analytics Team — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 22:39:00 GMT

Today we are announcing the release of the Microsoft Codename “Social Analytics” Lab. As the popularity of the social web continues to grow it has become increasingly important for businesses to keep their finger on the pulse of the social web. Social information provides businesses with new insights, and the social web provides a means to connect with customers and respond quickly to customer concerns or comments.

Microsoft Codename "Social Analytics" Lab is an experimental cloud service that provides an API enabling developers to easily integrate relevant social web information into business applications. Also included is a simple browsing application to view the social stream and the kind of analytics that can be constructed and integrated in your application.

You can get started with “Social Analytics” by exploring the social data available via the browsing application. With this first lab release, the data available is limited to two topics (“Windows 8” and “Bill Gates”). Future releases will allow you to define your own topic(s) of interest. The data in “Social Analytics” includes top social sources like Twitter, Facebook, blogs and forums. It has also been automatically enriched to tie conversations together across sources, and to assess sentiment.

Once you’re familiar with the data you’ve chosen, you can then use our API (based on the Open Data Protocol) to bring that social data directly into your own application.

Do you want to learn more about the Microsoft Codename “Social Analytics” Lab? Get started today, or for more information visit our official homepage, connect with us in our forums and stay tuned to our product blog for future updates.