Today in concert with the Windows7 launch the Windows Social Media Team is launching what we like to call the Windows7 Social Media Hub. It’s a place to see what our customers are saying about Windows 7. It pulls and displays content tagged with Windows 7 from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, blogs and the Windows Facebook Fan Page..
Since the release of the beta in January, Windows7 has had millions of customers testing and helping shape the Windows 7 experience through their comments and feedback. This hub is meant to highlight continuing conversations and give people insight into why Windows 7 is different and provide a place for them to learn more. If you want to participate in the Hub, go here and see what tags we’re searching for.
Below are FAQ’s to help explain the process:
How do I get my content into the Hub?
Content is pulled in through publically exposed APIs and looks for Windows7 keywords. Once that content is picked up, it goes through moderation.
Why are you moderating the feeds?
A few reasons:
- 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.
That doesn’t mean we’ll only include the good stuff and take out the bad. If there’s content that helps people get fair information about Windows 7, we’ll include it- even if it doesn’t put Windows 7 in the best light. We are focused on authentic, relevant information for customers.
The other note about moderation is that we have a team of humans who are going through the content. Those humans can’t possibly keep up with the millions of pieces of content that will come in over the next few weeks. If you don’t see something on the Hub that you posted, it’s very likely that it wasn’t moderated for content, but that it’s in the queue somewhere.
Where do we get the Total Posts Counter?
We’re using a tool called Looking Glass to pull in the content from the APIs. Looking Glass is a social media monitoring tool developed by Microsoft (currently in BETA). The math from the counter uses the following logic:
1) Looking Glass counts all of the content that it pulls in
2) We create a real-time minute by minute average of that content
3) The counter then increases at that average rate for that next few minutes until Looking Glass recalculates the next average.
The counter was started on October 20 and noon pacific time.
Let us know what other questions you have and we’ll answer any that we can.
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This site is great, incredibly valuable to businesses to watch the online conversations about their brand. You should consider the ability to for third parties to customize for their own companies.
It may even be a product business or PR companies would be willing to pay for.
Very neat web site!
I am curious about Looking Glass. Does it provide an export feature to republish the moderated content on the social media hub web site?
I’ve been looking for a tool that would gather content from a wide variety of social media sources and then allow a curator to create collections of interesting/relevant content (much like it seems you’re doing with moderation). Having end users participate in this curation would be great, but not not quite as important.
Anyhow, neat project and good luck with the launch!
my husband ordered Window 7 this morning. Still has no connection and has wasted 4 or 5 hours on the phone trying to speak with someone. Poor quality service.
I am really interested to learn how you are exctracting all this content from other pages…Could you please tell us more?
It will be interesting to see if you actually do allow for non-favorable posts like the comments on the “Users-just-don’t-yet-realize-how-much-they-actually-love-and-need-the-Ribbon” feature in Winders 7. With all the so favorable posts about the Ribbon in Office 2007 it’s a wonder anyone doesn’t like the Ribbon.
Still trying to figure out why the acceptance and rollout of Office 2007 has not been as extensive as prior Office updates? Hmmm, must be the lack of the Ribbon interface in every aspect of your users Windows expereince.
Perhaps Microsoft can push the Ribbon interface onto all Windows apps, super imposing it over the apps native nterface, regardless of whether they are Microsoft based products or for other vendors. After after all some vendors have been dumb enough to listen to their users feedback about their dislike of the Ribbon in Office 2007.
Yeah! That should really make paying users, happy! To force upon them a new interface that not only is less usefull but that is also not an optional one.
Its too late to fix this mistake in Office 2010 (at least it looks that way) and in Windows 7 but it’s not too late to listen to yoru users for future versions of your product. Instead of making upgrades less flexable how about looking at either giving users a choice on whether they want to have some new interface forced upon them or at least provide a discount for the hassle?
And I don’t buy into the argument about not being able to support the pre-Ribon interface along with the Ribbon because there are several third party Office (and hopefully soon to be Windows 7) utiltities that will let users rid themselevs of the digital plague known as the Ribbon.
i got windows vista with my desktop gateway, in december 2008, it came with vista, i have crashs, freezing up, errors i cant find an answer for, and i still cant work half the things on it, im not elgible for the upgrade, my model is DX430S
so i guess ill still use what i have and try learning it, all these other people that wrote in must be a genius,
I am unable to install Windows 7. Can I get some help?
Windows 7 is the best and I prefer it