A social Microsoft.com
There is a team at Microsoft that over the years has delivered some amazing things for the community of Microsoft customers: blogs on MSDN and TechNet, MSDN Wikis, Codeplex, the Microsoft.com RSS Directory, ASP.NET, and GotDotNet to name a few.
More recently people like Dave Morehouse, Korby Parnell, Bob Rebholz, Jana Carter, Doug Seven and Sandy Khaund have been thinking a great deal around some of the trends emerging around social software, and what these approaches can bring to both Microsoft's online presence and its customers.
One of the fun things about this phase of their design process is how they are 'thinking out loud' with some of their plans and actively looking for feedback as they go. Here are a few links as tasters:
- Dave's Spinning the Wheels post explores how tags and tagging, OPML collections and collaborative filtering can be leveraged across Microsoft.com
- Korby touches on serendipity as a social phenomenon, manifested through software
- Sandy considers the potential inherent in the networking of various community 'silos' that exist across the Microsoft.com, its affiliated sites and those run by customers to create a whole much more valuable whole than the sum of its parts.
If you are into 'social aoftware', keep an eye on this team...