I’m always fascinated by the power of Social to connect people and information quickly. I’m also intrigued by the sense of community that can be driven by social collaboration, and how that community can drive crowd-sourced content curation. Here’s an example of that community collaboration at work. ZDNet‘s MaryJo Foley published a post yesterday on Microsoft’s investment in Klout and associated Klout data integration into Bing Search results. In her post, Microsoft invests in Klout; integrates data into Bing MaryJo shared
Microsoft is making a “strategic investment” of an undisclosed size in social-media vendor Klout, company officials announced on its Bing Community blog on September 27.
On Bing, Microsoft is going to display Klout data — including a person’s Klout score and topics they are “influential” about — on the new Bing Sidebar pane for those users who can and want to see this information. And on Klout, “highlights from Bing will begin surfacing in the ‘moments’ section of some people’s Klout profiles,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.
This new partnership is related to Microsoft’s ongoing work to integrate social-search results into its Bing search engine via the sidebar panel, the same way that it does with Quora and foursquare.
When I read the post, I remembered an article I’d read earlier in the year about how Klout was using SQL Server and Hadoop from Gigaom and tweeted it to MaryJo.
@maryjofoley I'm guessing you know this but Klout & Microsoft go waaay back http://t.co/a9abZF25 #SQL
— Liza Sisler (@lizasisler) September 27, 2012
and this is what happened
@lizasisler I didn't know. So thanks for that link! Still doesn't change my opinion of Klout though 🙂
— Mary Jo Foley (@maryjofoley) September 27, 2012
@lizasisler adding the link to my post! Thanks again
— Mary Jo Foley (@maryjofoley) September 27, 2012
Sure enough MaryJo updated her post
Update: So maybe there really is a big data –and a Hadoop-specific play — in this Klout arrangement after all. Thanks to another of my Twitter buds, @Lizasisler from Perficient, comes this May 2012 GigaOm story about the relationship between Hadoop, Microsoft and Klout. (Remember, Microsoft is working on Hadoop for Windows Azure, and supposedly still Hadoop for Windows Server.) It sounds from this article as though Klout is a big SQL Server shop and a likely MySQL switcher.
I’ve written about the power of Twitter to connect people and information quickly before and we all have similar stories. What are yours?
Exactly what I was looking for! Thanks!