A lot can happen on the social media within a blink of an eye, be it relevant and not. And with a large fan following on the social websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, it becomes nearly impossible to keep a finger on the pulse of the social web. As a matter of fact social information can provide businesses with new insights and a means to connect with customers and respond quickly to customer concerns or comments.
As for now you might be subscribing to different channels on social websites to get relevant data of your interest. You may “Like” Facebook pages, “Follow” them on Twitter, Subscribe for RSS, and Newsletters. Even with selected subscriptions, it is not easy to get all updates in an organized way. It is a kind of clutter, when things you wanted show up on different portals like Facebook, Twitter and your email.
Microsoft Research is offering yet another tool that gives best possible solution to the large data flowing through social media online. They named it as “Social Analytics”. Microsoft Codename “Social Analytics” is an experimental cloud service. It is aimed at developers who want to integrate social web information into business applications.
Social Analytics from Microsoft Research
Social Analytics allows you to easily integrate social information into your business applications. The concept is all about providing you with one interface that has news feeds and social updates from all sources. The capability it has is much more than you would expect. They are:
- Enhanced analytics in API
- Sample usage of the enhanced analytics in the Engagement Client – 5 new analytic widgets
- Improved sentiment analysis for Tweets
Developers who are looking to integrates all the social updates into their application can use Microsoft’s Social Analytics API that offers bunch of features.
Social Analytics Features:
- The Engagement Client, used to browse and view analytics on a social dataset.
- Two pre-defined, actively streaming datasets which include data from top social sources such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and forums
- The Social Analytics API, based on the Open Data Protocol and delivered through the DataMarket on the Windows Azure Marketplace
You can start using the API by downloading relevant API keys by logging in from you Windows Live ID here.
