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Facebook Teams Up with Microsoft on Docs.com

admin — Thu, 27 May 2010 09:36:18 +0000

Mark Zuckerburg announced the stage of f8, the Facebook developer conference, that Facebook will be launching a collaborative document-editing tool with Microsoft. Docs.com will be released to the public in just a few hours.

Users will be able to find, create and share Microsoft Office documents with their Facebook friends. The site, which aims to blend two familiar experiences, was built using Microsoft Office 2010.

At the outset, this product seems like a more user-friendly, pared-down version of some of Google Wave’s collaborative document-editing features. We’ve seen a few startups and product features that have this capability; will Facebook’s partnership with Microsoft be powerful enough to crush competition â€” including Google Docs across the board?

Microsoft Launches Social Media Platform for Politicians

admin — Thu, 20 May 2010 09:38:40 +0000

Twitter and Facebook have become important platforms for politicians and public figures to connect with their constituents and fans. Today Microsoft is unveiling TownHall, a social media platform designed to further serve the needs of these political figures.

TownHall is part of Microsoft’s new Campaign Ready suite of tools and it’s essentially a plug-and-play web-based platform â€” hosted on Windows Azure â€” that can be used to build sites that support user engagement around campaign topics and encourage fan participation.

The target audience is government officials looking for ways to collect feedback and gauge the interest of their respective communities.

Those that employ TownHall can use the platform to support login via Facebook Connect, include poll questions, give visitors the ability to ask and answer questions, and reward participation with badges. The platform is designed so that the topics with the most traction bubble up to the top. On the backend, users are able to run reports and search within community discussions.

The code for TownHall was released to the public earlier today at the Politics Online Conference, but the technology is already powering NASA’s Be a Martian project and can also be seen in this demo site. We’re especially curious to see if politicians put TownHall to use and whether or not it will make Microsoft more relevant in the social media space.

Spindex: Microsoft Reveals Social Aggregator Tool

admin — Wed, 05 May 2010 09:23:19 +0000

Here at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Microsoft has announced its newest social media project: Spindex, a tool that aggregates social information from Facebook, Twitter, Bing, Evernote and RSS.

The application, which is only available in limited preview to attendees of the Web 2.0 Expo, is an attempt to â€œmake sense of your social overload” by giving you the ability to glance at what is hot in your social networks. It is a project of the Microsoft FUSE Lab, whose goal is to create new products that deliver a better social and real-time experience.

At first glance, Spindex sounds similar to FriendFeed or even Google Buzz, but in reality the project is an experiment that is still in its early stages â€” there is no indication that Spindex will become a core Microsoft product.

We’re going to gather more information on Spindex and test it out. Stay tuned to Mashable for updates.

Take-down notices going after Microsoft Cofee

admin — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:40:25 +0000

by Nicholas Deleon on November 23, 2009

You’ll recall that CrunchGear broke the news regarding the leak of Microsoft Cofee, a suite of applications used by law enforcement officials for their own devices. The leak came from a popular BitTorrent site, and then spread to The Pirate Bay and all over the Internet. Needless to say, it’s â€œout there.” So good luck to Microsoft in trying to stop its spread.

The application suite made its way to cryptome.org, which is a site that’s â€œfamous for privacy activism and exposing various hacking, intelligence and secrecy related information.” (Cryptome’s actually a fun site, and one I visit at least a few times per month. Check it out.) A little while goes by, and Cryptome’s host gets a take-down notice. The host complies because, well, maybe it’s not worth losing risking every single site on your server rack just to host one file that’s already floating around the Internet in perpetuity.

And that’s the beauty of this: Microsoft can try all it wants to hide Cofee, but it’s too late; it’s out there. It’s fairly pointless, especially now that The Pirate Bay has moved to a tracker-less setup.

And if you’re wondering, yes, it’s a legal requirement that for every time we write about Microsoft Cofee, we have to put a photo of a cup of coffee.