Kari Dean at Wired News has
the scoop on Wallop, Microsoft's consumer blogging and social networking service.
In fact, Wallop is Microsoft's venture into the red-hot social-networking arena, using the common Microsoft tack of piecing together existing technologies and packaging them for the novice user. Those technologies include Friendster-style social-networking capabilities, super-simplistic blogging tools, moblogging, wikis and RSS feeds, all based on Microsoft's Instant Messenger functionality.
"IM is more of a model for what we are doing than social networking," said Lili Cheng, research manager for Microsoft's social-computing group. "You can add Wallop to your Instant Messenger and add new pictures and content that way."
Cheng said Longhorn and knowledge-management researchers are exploring social-networking possibilities, but Wallop is its own entity.
Next month they open it for a more public beta and some guess the service will launch Q2 2004.
Yesterday I posted how blog vendors will increasingly provide group forming features to enhance utility at the skinny tail of the power law distribution. You have to commend MS for an IM centric approach to enhance blogs as conversation.
But architecture is political and often results in archipelagos. IM continents are adrift.
Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, a social-networking software company, noted that while all of Wallop's features are available elsewhere, "this stitches together lots of things that others have innovated on, and the integration looks appealing as a service."
Mayfield sees the integration of IM as particularly significant, as most blogging tools -- except AOL -- don't have that feature. However, he would prefer that such a tool be developed as an open-source project rather than a proprietary service.
"You have to commend AOL and Google (for their blogging tools)," Mayfield said. "They are big companies not just providing blogging, but providing it with open standards, participating in
Atom, the next-generation syndication standards after RSS.
"We anticipate (Wallop) as being very closed and proprietary, which is antithetical to the way that blogs, as technology and a culture, have developed."
Tell me if I am wrong, but it seems history is repeating itself. Some say its just vaporware, could be a trial balloon or a competitive service out to wallop uncontrolled innovation.
Mark Pincus, founder of
Tribe, said he wouldn't be surprised if the work on Wallop never gets off the ground as a viable service for consumers.
"Microsoft had the last seven years to create something that makes (building networked) groups easy, but they still have nothing today," Pincus said, citing threedegrees.com as an example of Microsoft's unsuccessful foray into social networking.
The Wired article leads with the point that there has been lots of bad guessing about what Wallop is -- but this not just a result of their new rubrick of Research as Marketing, its a failure to
engage the blogging
community.
Regardless, as Steve Gillmor pointed out,
its about time and space., independent services continue to be fostered by developers as users on top of open standards -- and in this case there is no center to be had.
update: Mary Jo Foley's Microsoft Watch Article includes screenshots.
1. Phil Wolff on November 9, 2003 2:15 AM writes...
One of Microsoft's strategies has always been to encourage rapid evolution in the ISV sphere, then bring successful, popular services into Windows or Office. ftp used to only be available from third parties, then was baked into Windows. Now every developer can access ftp from a Windows API. And spell checking. And a thousand other capabilities.
The Longhorn reports show this pattern continues. What's on the menu? Will fully bodied apps become tomorrow's features? Which protocols of the blogosphere will have a version wrapped into Windows?
Permalink to Comment2. Zbigniew Lukasiak on November 9, 2003 2:49 PM writes...
I've just started a wiki for discussing Social Networking Software the Open Source way: http://artcom-studio.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SocialRouting
Permalink to Comment