Microsoft Conducts research on Facebook about Social Psychology using Collabio

Microsoft Researchers have developed Collabio, a Facebook application designed to explore metadata and the logic related to tagging. On the surface its like any other Facebook application game it encourages users to guess tags that other friends have used to describe an individual. Points are awarded according to the number of other friends who have agreed with each tags. Collabio also relies on social motivations such as reciprocity; users are notified when friends tag them and are encouraged to tag in reponse. This simple looking game uses the data. But the data generated by this application is going to be mined by Microsoft researchers to help them figure out how to productively utilize social networks since currently all major companies are struggling in trying to figure out how to monetize social networks better so it is expected this data might be used to do greater ad targeting in Facebook. Microsoft describes it as

The game is a foray into exploring a new way to tap into knowledge contained within the social network and glean useful information for applications such as personalization or expert matching

More at Microsoft Research and Techcrunch