I'm impressed that Microsoft is crowd sourcing the information on their home page. They are presenting quotes posted on twitter by regular people. This lends a credibility and "realness" not normally associated with global corporate behemoths. The only negative comment I have is that they just attribute the comments to "Twitter User" rather than showing the actually user name. A simple twitter search leads you to the sources, but they should have made it a bit easier.

What's is a real winner is how they are aggregating and presenting user comments gathered from across a wide swath of social media. Windows 7 related posts, tweets and updates from twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flicker and select bloggers are displayed for all the world to see in one convenient place. The content is moderated before being displayed, but they do allow the occasional less than glowing comment to be shown. I took a look under the hood of the data feeds and noticed that they are doing some form of sentiment analysis as well. That information is not being surfaced, but it offers an some ideas about how a product like this could be used in the future. One thing that I noticed is that this dashboard has more than a passing similarity to Waggener Edstrom's Twendz. I don't think WaggEd produced this, so I have to assume that someone at Microsoft or Crispin, Porter + Bogusky saw it and decided to make it their own.