Contributed by: Editor on Thursday, March 24 2011 @ 02:44 pm
Last modified on Wednesday, May 24 2023 @ 11:48 am
First of all let me say, I do not think so 😉
GeekWire[*1] recently found a Microsoft patent filing from 2009 which explains a matchmaking system based on matching peoples private affinities:
The claimed subject matter relates to an architecture that can leverage private affinities in order to facilitate or enrich relationships between people. In particular, the architecture can receive a profile associated with a user wherein the profile includes a set of private affinities that are cryptographically protected from public inspection. The architecture can decrypt and/or cryptographically compare a private affinity from the profile to an affinity in a disparate profile (associated with a disparate user) in order to identify a matching affinity. Once a matching affinity is identified, a message indicating such can be provided to the user along with a request to publish certain revealed information to the disparate user, possibly based upon a mutual exchange of commensurate information from the disparate user.
So basically this sounds like a matching system based on a person’s attributes that are not available for public viewing. I doubt Microsoft would run with something like this directly (i.e. create a dating site) but I could see them maybe eventually incorporating it into Windows Live profiles.