Microsoft’s FUSE Labs unveils Emporia (alpha)

Ralf Herbrich of FUSE Labs in the UK just unveiled a new project that indexes and provides “lenses” on to Twitter here at the Thinking Digital conference in Gateshead. Project Emporia is available to play with now in Alpha form (i.e. early code) and allows you to browse and vote on information flowing through the Twitter ‘stream’ with your own lens to and tune it for content of interest to you – you can do this with or without a Twitter account.

In a nutshell, Project Emporia gives you a personalized search experience over publically available social network data from Twitter. It lets you browse, find, and discover highly relevant information on topics you’re interested in rather than surf the firehose of content from Twitter.

Emporia uses the Matchbox technology from Microsoft Research where Ralf is originally from – he’s the man behind the TrueSkill which is the clever stuff that does game player matching in Halo and other games on XBOX Live.

Go have a play with Project Emporia – it just went live!

oh and @herbkim asked Ralf in closing whether he got 20% time similar to Google engineers. Ralf’s answer – nah, I get 100% time