Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Sammy Shreibati

Jesse Jyh-Cherng Hsia

Vivian Mak Urata

Shaunak Chatterjee

Mark Hull

Birjodh S Tiwana

Kinjal Basu

Christopher Szeto

Siva Visakan Sooriyan

Haowen Ning

Rachel Kumar

Jingwei Huang

Haiyang Liu

Gaganpreet Singh Shah

Michael Joshua Aft

Jack Henry Majoros

Christopher Randall Arrowood

Chong Ho Lee

Described herein is a contextual contact recommendation or suggestion service and system. The service, which, in some embodiments, is integrated with a social networking service and/or an instant messaging service, takes as input a first parameter that identifies a member of the social networking service, and a second parameter that defines a context (e.g., a web page that is being viewed by the member. The service, based in part on the context, computes a ranked list of members to populate a contextual contact list, thereby recommending or suggesting contacts, with whom the member might be interested in initiating, or continuing, a conversation, based on the context of the member's current web browsing session. Optionally, the service may take as input a third parameter, defining a use case, such that the recommendation algorithm can be customized by use case.

Techniques for presenting a contextual contact list

Disclosed are systems, methods, and non-transitory computer-readable media for batching requests for presence information. A client device determines a set of user indicators that are displayed on a display of the client device during a period of time. Each user indicator corresponds to a user of an online service, and is presented on the display as a result of a user of the client device viewing content provided by the online service. At completion of the period of time, the client device determines a set of remaining user indicators displayed on the display of the client device, and transmits, to a server associated with the online service, a batched request for presence information for a set of users corresponding to the set of remaining user indicators. The client device presents presence indicators indicating the status of the users based on the requested presence information.

Presence indicators

Among other things, embodiments of the present disclosure discussed herein may be used to receive, analyze, and distribute queries about various topics from a member of an online social network to other members of the social network. The embodiments of the present disclosure may additionally assess the quality of responses to queries by members, as well as expand or narrow the distribution of the query among the social network based on various events and criteria.

Query processing for online social networks

Growing community of inventors

Menlo Park, CA, United States of America

Sammy Shreibati