Is Microsoft Getting Social? - Coming Soon: New Tools, and Then Some
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Justin Osmer, senior product manager for MSN, has the answer to that question. In fact, the tool his division is working on should be able to give the answers to a lot of questions. While the company won’t reveal a name for the tool, it is supposed to be a question-and-answer service that involves social search. The idea is to let users ask questions of other users who have similar interests and concerns, so that they can get answers from people who presumably have direct experience with similar situations.
It appears that the software giant will have some help in this task. According to an article in Business Week Online, Microsoft is working to purchase or create an alliance with Eurekster.com. The two-year-old start-up specializes in social network searching. To quote from the article, “Eurekster essentially combines generic search, through a partnership with Yahoo, with information culled from social-networking sites, such as Friendster.com.” Eurekster’s technology can help people who want answers from a group with particular affinities and interests – so a newbie collector can find out more information about his latest purchase from like-minded collectors. Or, more seriously, a woman with breast cancer facing chemotherapy can get answers from other woman who have undergone the treatment about ways to minimize, or at least cope with, the side effects.
Eurekster boasts two existing patents on its technology, and six more are pending. It seems to be particularly proud of the way its search engines learn from user behavior. It’s even trying to introduce a new word on its website: swiki, a combination of a search engine and a wiki (to emphasize the community element, no doubt). In an interview, Eurekster CEO Steven Marder commented that “If our technology were in the hands of one of [the search engines or a huge media company], it would be a competitive advantage.” With its current position in the search engine wars, and the continuing slide of that position, one could hardly blame Microsoft for figuring it can use all the competitive advantages it can get.
If Microsoft forged a deal with or purchased Eurekster, it would hardly be its only advantage in the social search engine battle. The company has more than 205 million users of its instant messaging program and more than 230 million active Hotmail users. That’s a mountain of data that the company can mine and bring to bear on social search.
The point of all this, of course, is monetization. How do you make money from a community of people asking questions and getting answers? Well, Yahoo’s research on the subject reveals that people are most often interested in e-commerce when they are using social network searching. Advertisers may therefore pay good money to place their ads in areas with a social search component – quite possibly more than they would to place their ads near more traditional search engine results.
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