14 DAY TRIAL // Political Streams is the first application from Microsoft Live Labs built on the company's Social Stream platform. Debuted just in time for the U.S. presidential election, Political Stream is a project designed to centralize content from a variety of sources including newsgroups, news websites and blogs. But although it is referring to Social Stream as a platform, Microsoft indicated that currently there isn't an application programming interface available for developers to put together their own projects.
“Keeping up to date on the presidential election means keeping track of lots of information from lots of different sources. Things can change in a matter of minutes,” revealed a member of the Microsoft Live Labs team. “With stories bouncing from the blogosphere into the mainstream media and back again, it's become more important to keep track of both. Rather than going from site to site--or even reading multiple RSS feeds--wouldn't it just be easier to see all the latest news at a glance?”
And all the latest news at a glance is exactly what Political Streams promises to deliver. The website offers a total of four focus areas: News Attention, Blogs Attention, People Attention, and Places Attention. “'Attention' is a measure of how much time people spend focusing on a specific subject,” Microsoft explained.
Essentially, Microsoft's new Social Stream-based application is set up as an “agora” for political discussion centralized from online sources in real time. The website also delivers a context in which each dialog item permits users to get a much broader view on any subject.
Political Streams “mines information from all the blogs and Web sites out there, and all on one screen, lets you see the relative popularity of any given story, whether it's trending up or down, and tracks the number of mentions of the people and places mentioned in the story,” The Microsoft Live Labs representative added.