Microsoft Embedded Social

Microsoft Embedded Social (ES) is a scalable, multi-tenant cloud service with client SDKs that can increase user engagement inside applications. ES enables developers to create one or more communities within their applications. Users interact in-the-context and in-the-moment with other users that share a common interest. For example, users of a wine recommendation app that integrates with ES would be able to follow their favorite wine critics and discuss particular varietals of wine that they enjoy, all within that wine app. Creating an application-specific community helps users discover others that share their interest and drives engagement with the application. Driving engagement is key for developers today, as it directly influences monetization.

Over 20 million users | Source code available on GitHub

Our iOS and Android SDKs enable the UI experience to be deeply integrated within your application. The end user does not feel like they are being pulled out of the app into a separate “social experience”, as is the case with SDKs from the large existing social networks. For example, the Facebook SDK provides a user experience familiar to anyone used to the Facebook app or website, but that experience feels disconnected when integrated into another application.

The ES platform consists of server-side and client-side components. Adding ES to an existing application should be trivial – in just a few hours work, a developer can add a fully-featured social experience to an existing application. Our cloud service source code is available on GitHub, allowing you to run it on Azure. It exposes a richly documented REST API that provides many features familiar to users of existing social networks, such asfeeds, topics, comments and replies, likes, image and video sharing, a per-app social graph, search, hashtags, and multiple authentication mechanisms. On the client-side, ES provides platform specific SDKs that include a complete, professionally-designed UI experience for each of the APIs exposed by the ES service.

The ES platform has already proven to be scalable and robust. ES powers the social features in a wide variety of applications across many different platforms both mobile and Web. Our service has scaled to support over 21 million users, and we have already demonstrated the ability to scale to 350 million requests per day.

Research Papers

Embedded Social has also been used by researchers, as a large-scale production system, to pursue interesting new directions and solve hard distributed systems problems. Here are two such papers:

• Lillian Tsai, Roberta De Viti, Matthew Lentz, Stefan Saroiu, Bobby Bhattacharjee, Peter Druschelen Closure: Group Communication via Encounter Closures, MobiSys 2019: Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, June 2019, Pages 353–365
• Liang Luo, Suman Nath, Lenin Ravindranath Sivalingam, and Madan Musuvathi, Luis Ceze Troubleshooting Transiently-Recurring Errors in Production Systems with Blame-Proportional Logging, Proceedings of the 2018 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC ’18). July 11–13, 2018 • Boston, MA, USA

For more information, check out the applications, videos and source code tabs above.