Information feeds of a social network

• US 8,145,678 B2
• Filed: 08/29/2008
• Issued: 03/27/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 08/29/2008
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Ramsay, JR., Donald A., Caldwell, Gary, Jiang, Ning, Veeraraghavan, Venkatesh, Giacobbe, Gail Borod
• Primary Examiner(s): BROWN, SHEREE N
• Application Number:
  US12/201,290
• Publication Number:
  US 20100057682A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,306 Days
• Field of Search: 707/101, 707/781
• US Class Current: 707/802
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/10 Office automation; Time management

Abstract

Various embodiments can be configured to provide a social networking computing environment. In an embodiment, a networked computing system can be used to provide informational feeds and commenting functionality to users of a social computing environment. In one embodiment, an enterprise-based social computing system can be configured to provide informational feeds to social networking application users. An informational feed can be populated with events and other information associated with one or more users of interest of an application user, but is not so limited. In one embodiment, a social computing environment can be configured to allow user commenting to feed items or events that are associated with a user or group of users.

Claims

1. A method of providing information to one or more users of an enterprise-based social networking computing environment comprising:

generating an informational feed that includes enterprise-based system-generated events associated with one or more users of interest of the enterprise-based social networking computing environment based in part on an organizational context of an enterprise to generate the enterprise-based system-generated events;

providing a comment to an enterprise-based system-generated event associated with a defined user of interest;

updating the informational feed to delineate the comment interleaved with the enterprise-based system-generated events to display comment information as part of the informational feed; and

,

providing an updated informational feed including the comment information to a tracking user and automatically adding a commenting user associated with the comment to a tracking list of the tracking user without requiring mutual collaboration in order for the commenting user to be included in the tracking list of the tracking user.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising expanding the enterprise-based social networking computing environment to include the commenting user who commented on the enterprise-based system-generated event and displaying the comment as an event in the informational feed of the tracking user including one or more of expanding the tracking user'"'"'s social network when a user who is not presently defined as a user of interest comments on an event of a user who is defined as a user of interest and when a user who is presently defined as a user of interest comments on an event of a user who is not defined as a user of interest.

3. The method of claim 1, further comprising providing comments to one or more of the enterprise-based system-generated events as part of an Intranet-based social networking computing system.

4. The method of claim 1, further comprising generating a message to inform the tracking user of one or more comments.

5. The method of claim 1, further comprising providing the comment to one or more users being tracked by the tracking user.

6. The method of claim 1, further comprising expanding the enterprise-based social networking computing environment to one or more users of interest of the tracking user including automatically generating the enterprise-based system-generated events using a number of back-end systems as a result of users doing normal work.

7. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

retrieving the enterprise-based system-generated events associated with one more monitored users from back-end systems of an enterprise-based computing network; and

,

including the enterprise-based system-generated events in the informational feed.

8. The method of claim 1, further comprising including one or more comments in an event feed of another user based in part on an affiliation with a commenting user.

9. The method of claim 1, further comprising including one or more comments in an event feed of another user based in part on an affiliation with the tracking user.

10. The method of claim 1, further comprising including adding a commenting user as a user of interest to a tracking list of the defined user of interest.

11. The method of claim 1, further comprising compressing a comment by an associated enterprise-based system-generated event when the comment and associated enterprise-based system-generated event occur within a defined amount of time.

12. The method of claim 1, further comprising including the comment and information associated with a commenting user as part of the informational feed and automatically adding the commenting user to the tracking list to then populate the informational feed with events associated with the commenting user.

13. A system configured to provide a social computing environment comprising:

processor and memory resources;

a collector to collect information using one or more back-end systems associated with users of the system;

a filter to filter the collected information and provide enterprise-based events associated with one or more users of interest;

a comment component configured to provide commenting functionality to system users;

a feed generator to create an enterprise-based event feed that includes the one or more filtered events based in part on an organizational context of an enterprise and information associated with one or more user comments, provide the enterprise-based event feed to a target user, and update the enterprise-based event feed to delineate one or more user comments interleaved with the enterprise-based events to provide comment information as part of the enterprise-based event feed; and

,

a user relation management component to automatically add one or more commenting users to an enterprise-based social network of the target user without requiring mutual collaboration in order for commenting users to be included in tracking lists of a tracking users.

14. The system of claim 13, wherein the comment component can operate to inform a user of a user comment.

15. The system of claim 13, wherein the feed generator can populate the enterprise-based event feed with a user comment, including a time and an identity of a commenting user.

16. The system of claim 13, the user relation management component to expand a user'"'"'s social network by automatically adding a commenting user to a tracking list of the defined user of interest.

17. The system of claim 16, wherein the feed generator can provide one or more enterprise-based events associated with a tracking user in an event feed of the commenting user.

18. A computer-readable storage medium with instructions which, when executed, provide an interactive social network by:

creating an event stream that includes enterprise-based system-generated events associated with one or more enterprise users, wherein the event stream can be tailored for a tracking user;

receiving a comment associated with an enterprise-based system-generated event of the event stream;

interspersing the comment with the event stream including updating the event stream to delineate the comment interleaved with the enterprise-based system-generated events when displaying comment information as part of the event stream;

automatically adding a commenting user associated with the comment to the interactive social network of the tracking user; and

,

providing the event stream including the comment information to the tracking user.

19. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 18, wherein the instructions, when executed, further provide the interactive social network by expanding a personalized social network of the tracking user by adding the commenting user to a tracking list without the tracking user having to proactively supply information to the interactive social network.

20. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 18, wherein the instructions, when executed, further provide the interactive social network by alerting the tracking user of a user comment by indicating a number of comments associated with an event of the event stream.