SMART BUTTON

• US 20090112785A1
• Filed: 12/31/2008
• Published: 04/30/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 09/30/2003
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Achlioptas, Dimitris
• Granted Patent: US 9,367,850 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 706/46
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/02 Marketing; Price estimation or determination; Fundraising

Abstract

The present invention provides for systems and methods that facilitate conveying user information between and among users effectively to thereby create a collaborative filtering environment with maintained user privacy. More specifically, the present invention allows user-profile building to occur coincident with user-browsing, for example. This can be accomplished in part by incorporating an input component on the user interface used for browsing and/or searching. A user who has opted-in to construct a personal profile makes declarations regarding his relationship with at least a portion of the information being currently viewed. The declarations are annotated to the user'"'"'s profile. At the user'"'"'s discretion, the user'"'"'s profile can be disseminated to others in whole or in part such that other people can make use of the user'"'"'s expertise, experience or opinions. In addition, the user profiles can be machine-readable and searchable.

Claims

1. A computer implemented system that facilitates populating a sharable user profile comprising:

a user interface for a computer system comprising at least a processor communicatively coupled to a memory;

at least one input component that automatically reflects a context of a current computer-based interaction of a user; and

a profile component that populates a profile of the user with at least the contextual reflection of the computer-based interaction associated with user interaction with the input component.

2. The system of claim 1 wherein the computer-based interaction relates to content presented in a web browser, audio content, visual content, or combinations thereof.

3. The system of claim 2 wherein the content is at least one of a web page, a video, music, or combinations thereof.

4. The system of claim 1 wherein the input components respectively are user interface (UI) buttons.

5. The system of claim 1, wherein the profile of the user is associated with an internet social network.

6. The system of claim 5, wherein aspects of the social network user profile are sharable with other social network users and at least a subset of those shared aspects dynamically reflect updates to the user profile related to the automatically reflected context of the current computer-based interaction resulting from the user interaction with the input component.

7. The system of claim 6, wherein the subset of shared aspects at least in part communicate to the other social network users the automatically reflected context of the current computer-based interaction of the user.

8. The system of claim 6, wherein the other social network users can access web-content, video, music, or combinations thereof related to a the automatically reflected context of the current computer-based interaction of the user

9. The system of claim 1 further comprising an inference component to facilitate formation of the automatically reflected context of the current computer-based interaction of the user, wherein the inference component comprises at least one of a support vector machine (SVM), a naï

ve Bayes model, a Bayesian network, a decision tree, a Hidden Markov Model (HMM), a neural network, a data fusion engine, or combinations thereof.

10. A computer-implemented method that facilitates populating a sharable user profile comprising:

displaying a user interface for a computer system comprising at least a processor communicatively coupled to a memory;

providing at least one input component in the user interface display that automatically reflects a context of a current computer-based interaction of a user; and

populating a profile of the user with at least the contextual reflection of the computer-based interaction associated with user interaction with the input component.

11. The method of claim 10, wherein providing the at least one input component includes providing at least a UI button.

12. The method of claim 10, wherein the automatically reflected context of a current computer-based interaction of a user is associated with a web-page, visual content, audio content, or combinations thereof.

13. The method of claim 12, wherein the automatically reflected context of a current computer-based interaction of a user is related to a desire of the user to share the content with other disparate users.

14. The method of claim 13, wherein the user can share at least a portion of the user profile.

15. The method of claim 14, wherein the user can share at least a portion of the user profile with an internet social network.

16. The method of claim 15, wherein the user can share access to web-content, visual media, audible media, or combinations thereof with other users of the internet social network.

17. The method of claim 10, further comprising forming at least an inference to facilitate formation of the automatically reflected context of the current computer-based interaction of the user.

18. A computer-implemented method that facilitates conveying information in an internet social networking environment about a user to other users comprising:

analyzing a user interaction with a computer-based content source external to the social network environment;

automatically reflecting the context of the interaction in a user selectable user interface component; and

dynamically populating a user profile associated with the social network environment with information related to the context of the interaction in response to user selection of the user interface component.

19. The method of claim 18 facilitating sharing of web pages, web content, videos, music, or combinations thereof between the user and other users of the social network through the population of the user profile.

20. The method of claim 18 wherein the user selectable interface component is a UI button effecting sharing of the automatically reflected context of the user interaction by way of the user profile.