Here are answers to the frequently asked questions about the Social Web Experience Toolbar:
What does the Social Web Experience Toolbar do?
The Social Web Experience Toolbar is an Internet Explorer add on that analyzes the content of the web pages you are browsing, and the content of your social network. When the Social Web Experience Toolbar finds information in your social network that is related to what you are reading on the Web, it adds it to the Web page.
Why do I want the Social Web Experience Toolbar?
The Social Web Experience Toolbar helps you keep up with what's going on in your social network that is related to what you're doing on the web.
How do I get the Social Web Experience Toolbar?
The Social Web Experience Toolbar is available for download.
Should I expect the Social Web Experience Toolbar to work perfectly?
No, this is a research prototype and it has bugs. Our strategy with this project is to build a working end-to-end scenario, get early feedback and then improve its key weaknesses. For example, we're already working on optimizing our text analysis technologies for short messages. If you do run into problems, let us know.
What about privacy?
The Social Web ExperienceToolbar does all of its analysis on your computer, not in the cloud. Social Web Experience doesn't send information about the pages you are browsing or your social network off of your computer.
Social Web Experience does track basic quantitative statistics about where messages come from, how it analyzes the messages, how many matches are found, and how many messages pop-up and are clicked on. For example, it tracks how many messages from Twitter are shown and what percentage are clicked on, and it tracks the quality scores we assign to messages and how that relates to click rates. These statistics are uploaded to our servers so that we can improve our prototype.
I have problems installing the msi, what could be wrong?
Why is there a yellow alert icon as soon as I startup the toolbar?
There can be several reasons for this, such as Twitter service is down, but the most common scenario is likely to be because you haven’t logged into Facebook and given permissions to Social Web Experience for us to show you your Facebook social data
My SWE toolbar says “No entities found in page, probably because your social data has not loaded” even though I’ve given it access to my Facebook account, what’s going on?
Social Web Experience does all its analysis and data downloading by loading asynchronously to allow for a better user experience. Because of that, Social Web Experience often ends up loading your social data after the page has loaded, especially so when you open a new browser tab or window. Try refreshing the page and you should see the Social Web Experience social popups.
Why does Social Web Experience need off line access, stream get/post access to Facebook? Will you store my password?
Nope, Social Web Experience does not store your password. Social Web Experience stores a session cookie ID that Facebook passes to Social Web Experience, which allows Social Web Experience to authenticate silently so you don’t have to click Log in every time you open a new Internet Explorer tab or window.
What is being grabbed from Twitter and Facebook?
From Twitter, we grab the popular current, daily, or weekly topics and the more recent tweets associated with those topics. In Facebook, Social Web Experience grabs your friends’ profile and newsfeed or status update messages while respecting all privacy settings you and your friends may have set on Facebook. Oh and you can of course, change what Social Web Experience grabs in the Settings menu by clicking More Settings and checking or unchecking the information you want to provide to Social Web Experience.
What does the slider in the More Settings page do?
This slider allows you to tell our engine how many Social Web Experience social popups you want to see per page, ranging from only showing the top ranked matches all the way to showing all matches, if you’re interested in seeing absolutely everything. From some preliminary UX experiments, we’ve found out that people don’t want too many popups on the page and hence, we’ve set the default value at a relatively low threshold to ensure a non-obtrusive end user experience.
What if there are certain sites I don’t want SWE to modify or markup with SWE social popups?
In the More Settings menu, on the Ignored Sites tab, you can add sites for us to ignore when we do our analysis and mark up pages.
What are the green or red faces on the SWE toolbar?
They’re there to allow you to easily give us feedback on whether you have had a positive or negative experience with our beta Social Web Experience toolbar. We use this feedback to prioritize features and train our ranking algorithm among other things, so we highly value and encourage you to give us feedback.
How do I know if I have the latest version of Social Web Experience?
On the top right, a yellow alert icon will appear if a newer version of Social Web Experience is detected. Don’t worry, we want to keep you up to date with our latest builds.
How do I disable or uninstall SWE?
To disable SWE temporarily, go to Tools, click Manage Add-ons, and then disable Social Web Experience. If you’d like to uninstall Social Web Experience, you will need to uninstall it by going to Control Panel.
I have questions beyond this FAQ, how do I contact you?
Send us your feedback or questions to swefb@microsoft.com. We look forward to hearing from you.
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