From FUSE Labs

May 28, 2010 13:54 GMT  ·  By

Emporia is a new Microsoft project designed to deliver a new perspective on the Twitter social universe. Developed by FUSE labs and Microsoft Research, Project Emporia comes with the promise of opening up the social world for its users beyond anything that rival products are capable of delivering. The service is currently in Alpha stage, and, as such, access to certain functionality is limited. For the time being, only Microsoft FUSE Labs employees will be able to take advantage of the like/dislike options, for example. However, access to the Emporia website and the actual Cloud application is unrestricted, and customers can start using it immediately.

“Project Emporia provides a new, crowd-sourced form of web search by aggregating the relevant tweets with web links around a topic and viewing them as support votes for the links. Type ‘Microsoft’ and filter down by one star relevance in the ‘technology’ lens to get a list of web links about the latest technologies from Microsoft rated highly relevant by the Twitter community. Or change to the ‘business’ lens to get highly rated web links about Microsoft’s businesses,” an excerpt from the project’s presentation reads.

What Emporia does is grab the Twitter public feed and automatically filter content in accordance with certain criteria that Microsoft calls lenses. Essentially, users can select lenses/topics and access Twitter updates related to the options they set. For example, Emporia is currently offering lenses such as Technology, Entertainment, Sports, News and Business. Users can restrict search results even further by entering queries related to the topic they’re interested in.

“Key Features: Project Emporia identifies relevant updates in Twitter and surfaces content by topic rated relevant under appropriate lenses on the world. Project Emporia gives users a way to tap the social network data without needing to have a Twitter account. Project Emporia provides a personalized, crowd-sourced, web search experience,” Microsoft adds.