Microsoft Live Labs launches politically focused social-media site

Microsoft's Live Labs -- the Microsoft incubation lab that combines Microsoft researchers with MSN product managers -- has launched a new technology preview, just in time for the U.S. presidential election.

Live Labs released on October 9 "Poltical Streams," which the company is describing as a way for individuals to receive "at a glance, a more complete picture of the information and opinions on the Web on a single page."

Political Streams is the first of what is likely to be a number of vertically focused streams built atop Live Lab's new "Social Streams" platform that is designed to index "social media" from around the Web, including blogs, newsgroups, news sites and discussions. Social Streams builds on new data-mining, inference and higher-order patterning technologies under investigation by Live Labs team members.

While there are no publicly available Social Streams programming interfaces, at least  so far, Microsoft isn't ruling out the possibility that it might allow third party developers to create Social Streams, too.

Here's how the new site works, according to an e-mail I received from a company spokesperson:

"Political Streams mines a stream of political content from both web sites and blogs in real time and then ranks that content, as topics, people and places mentioned rise and fall in popularity across the Internet. Headlines let you click down to an abstract of the story, along with graphs tracking the trends of people and places mentioned,  as well as a link letting you click down to the full text of the story from there. This provides a broader context, allowing people to understand how the mainstream media and social media are discussing the issue, person or place."

Microsoft's plan is to close the Political Streams site once the election is over so that members of Live Labs can analyze usage data.

I noted recently that Microsoft's much-touted Live Labs seemed to be short on projects. But it seems there are quite a few in the hopper. Stay tuned for more on that front.