Microsoft got innovative yesterday — and everyone showed up to see it.
Microsoft Live Labs, the group of folks who work intently at creating innovative Internet products for Microsoft, released Photosynth, the amazingly cool service that lets you take a stack of photos of a place and turn it into a 3-D model you can explore virtually. It’s almost sci-fi stuff, and nearly everyone is enthusiastic about its potential.
The downside of all this potential and popularity is that the Live Labs servers were overwhelmed yesterday after the initial release of Photosynth. So much so that they temporarily had to turn things off for awhile.
We were proud to be part of the Photosynth launch, helping them deal swiftly and effectively with their outage, as well as the myriad of customer questions, problems and product feedback. The Live Labs folks integrated Get Satisfaction directly into their site as their official channel for engaging with customers. They used it to provide ongoing updates about their outage.
During the course of the day, over 14,000 people visited the Live Labs Get Satisfaction section and added 87 topics. If Live Labs had used a traditional e-mail or trouble-ticket-based service, this traffic would have translated into many hundreds or thousands of separate messages, mostly duplicates. With Get Satisfaction their customers quickly got help and shared feedback in the public community, avoiding redundant private communication.
If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s an excellent video (embedded below) from the TED conference that is a great introduction to Photosynth. Plus, Walt Mossberg wrote a good review of Photosynth that is definitely worth checking out.
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