Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Sameer Halai

Todd D Newman

Arjmand Samuel

Steve Ickman

Stephen B Coy

Flynn Joffray

William L Portnoy

Will Portnoy

A media party network service manages a set of media parties and a set of users of the media party service. Managing the media parties can involve instantiating new media parties according to input from the users, allowing the users to join the media parties, and tracking which users are participating in which media parties. Managing a given one of the media parties may include maintaining a queue of media items, allowing users in the media party to provide input to add media items to the queue and to provide input to skip media items in the queue. The media party service streams the given one of the media parties to client devices of the users currently in the given media party such that all of the client devices are currently displaying substantially a same part of a media item in the corresponding queue.

Collaborative media sharing

Techniques for invite abuse prevention are described. In an implementation, data that describes mutual activities of the clients with one or more resources available via a service provider is obtained from multiple clients. The service provider may use this data regarding mutual activities to ascertain activity scores between clients that interact directly. The ascertained activity scores may then be used to compute a score between two subject clients to control invites and/or other interactions between the clients. Computing the score may include determining one or more connections between the two clients through clients that interact directly, calculating candidate values for the one or more connections, and selecting one of the candidate values as the computed score using various techniques. The computed score may be used in various ways to control invites and/or other interactions between the clients using the one or more resources.

Invite abuse prevention

Techniques for social network mapping are described. In an implementation, properties of a user's contacts with two services are analyzed to identify matching contacts. Contacts may be determined to correspond to the same user when sufficient common properties are found between the contacts. For unmatched contacts following the property analysis, additional processing may be conducted to identify contacts that the unmatched contacts have in common. A number of common contacts found through this processing may be used, alone or in combination, with information regarding common properties to determine when unmatched contacts correspond to the same user.

Social network mapping

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

Sameer Halai