14 DAY TRIAL // Do you remember the “good news” that Kylie was advertising in the first official Windows 7 video commercial? Well, Microsoft managed to kick it up a notch. And if you visit the company’s homepage you’ll understand what I’m talking about. Sporting a new green, Windows 7 Home Premium-like background, the center of the page is now owned by a Silverlight area that offers endless quotes obtained from various sources around the web including Twitter and Digg, all sharing one common characteristic, namely praises for Windows 7.
Although being harvested from a variety of sources, the feedback gathered by Microsoft doesn’t come from reviewers, journalists, IT professionals, developers etc. Instead, the Redmond company has focused on tapping the opinions of end users, all anonymous, which were expressed in forums or twits.
And Microsoft did one better; it debuted the “What people are saying about Windows 7” webpage. According to Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc, the social media “hub” for Windows 7 on Windows.com was designed to accompany the celebration of Windows 7’s launch.
“This hub is designed to highlight what our customers are saying about Windows 7. It does this by pulling content from all over the web (via tweets, blog posts, etc.) of people talking about Windows 7 and bringing it all to one central location so you can see what everyone is saying about Windows 7,” LeBlanc noted.
According to the Redmond company, the social hub designed around its latest iteration of the Windows client is set up to automatically gather feedback from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Blogs and the Windows Facebook Fan Page. The content tagged with Windows 7 that is pulled from the Internet and displayed by the application is being moderated by the Redmond company. At the time of this article, the Windows 7 Social Hub had gathered in excess of 21,000 posts from around the web.
“Moderation allows us to sort the conversations into categories like gaming, or media so they’re easier for readers to find and navigate the heavy amount of conversation. This is a family site- we’ll remove any obscenities, spam, or other inappropriate content. We want the conversation to be focused on Windows7, not industry debates or sales promotions. We are making an effort to screen out any ‘gamers’ of the system trying to promote their own agendas,” revealed Marty Collins, group marketing manager in Microsoft's Windows consumer marketing group.