Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Vivian Mak Urata

Jesse Jyh-Cherng Hsia

Sammy Shreibati

Shaunak Chatterjee

Mark Hull

Birjodh S Tiwana

Kinjal Basu

Siva Visakan Sooriyan

Rachel Kumar

Haiyang Liu

Gaganpreet Singh Shah

Chong Ho Lee

Michael Joshua Aft

Christopher Randall Arrowood

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

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

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San Francisco, CA, United States of America

Vivian Mak Urata