Downloader: Microsoft's Project Emporia lets you keep on top of real-time news without a Twitter account

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Microsoft's Project Emporia lets you keep on top of real-time news without a Twitter account

Filed under: Microsoft, Social Software, web 2.0

Project Emporia, from the very same FUSE lab that brought us Spindex, has a name that no doubt stems from the ancient mercantile 'emporium' of valuable goods. It is, put simply, a Silverlight app which skims the best of the rest from Twitter.

Select a lens (or topic), such as 'technology' or 'business', and watch as Twitter is filtered into two delightful columns -- in real time! You get a Twitter stream on the left and excerpts from highly-ranked, linked-to websites on the right. You can select a desired 'relevance' (up to 5 stars) and search for a specific subject within a lens, but that's it.

I'm also glad to announce that, unlike Facebook which only has 'like', Project Emporia also has 'dislike'! Emporia uses crowd-sourcing of these likes and dislikes to divine what is and isn't relevant or popular -- and for now, as it's very early days, only a few people can like or dislike tweets. Presumably, in the future, other social networks will also feed into Project Emporia -- though Twitter is more than enough to start with!

If you sign in (using your Live account), your preferences are stored and Project Emporia learns and uses MIcrosoft Research's highly-effective Matchbox recommendation technology (PDF) to tailor the eclectic Twitter stream into much more manageable and informative experience. For a tool that's still in the alpha stages of development, Project Emporia is rather impressive. Keep an eye on it! Once the public can like and dislike tweets its value will skyrocket.