14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has opened up access to Project Emporia to the public, a FUSE Labs initiative introduced in the first half of 2010.
Users can now head over to the Project Emporia website or get the Windows Phone 7 application for their devices, and upgrade their current perspective over the social networking universe with a focus on Twitter.
According to Ralf Herbrich, Principal Dev Manager, Bing Mobile Personalization, Matchbox, the technology that powers Project Emporia, is designed to understand information on the web more like a human might.
“Every day we face an information overflow; data is coming at us through so many channels that it is difficult to weed out the gems that are important to us from all the noise. For those who are not social media mavens, the whole problem can be intimidating,” reads Microsoft’s description of the FUSE Labs project.
“Project Emporia offers a solution to this. It sifts through ever-evolving news streams to identify hot news stories, categorizes them into topic areas and ranks them, and then presents them to you in a friendly and easy-to-use UI. With Project Emporia you get relevant stories on topics of your choice.”
Herbrich explains that Matchbox is capable of going beyond traditional methods of personalization such as ‘collaborative filtering’ set up to cover static content.
Instead, Matchbox is tailored to dynamic content, such as news stories or social networking updates, etc.
“Rather than looking only at what others like you are interacting with on the web, the Matchbox technology begins to ‘understand’ the Web more like a human might,” Herbrich said.
“This enables us to make predictions about what you might want to see, not only based on if someone like you has done something with it but also on what the content says.”
Users continue to get options to influence the content that is being served to them, and Project Emporia offers an excellent example in this regard.
The FUSE Labs initiative offers customers the option to vote whether they want to see more or less of a specific news item, or to mark it as read.
Emporia “combines three major pieces of technology:
- Filter news stories by automatically predicted news categories
- Deep social integration of Twitter so you can see what stories your friends and friends-of-friends are sharing as well as curate your Twitter network
- Recommend news stories based on your personal preference votes,” Herbrich added.