Wired News :: Will Microsoft Wallop Friendster?
By Kari L. Dean
The two articles that I cite and quote today - from Wired and eWEEK - offer a little more on Wallop - Microsoft's 'invitation only' entry into social networking and blogging - and an extension of their IM product that is currently being tested by approximately 100 Microsoft employees.
Wallop is receiving mixed reviews as a entrant into the social networking / blogging sphere of services. Recently there has been a surge in mainstream news articles reporting on this cross-over area between social networking, social software, and weblogging.
...Rumors about Microsoft's Wallop have been greatly exaggerated, mostly due to the blogging community's inability to penetrate the site's invitation-only front door.
...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 Wallop enables users to build online social networks in a more realistic manner than Friendster, the popular social-networking website. Friendster membership works by invitation only. Once new users establish Friendster profiles -- complete with pictures and lists of interests -- they can search an ever-growing network of friends, and friends of friends, for people they might want to contact. That network can get so large that it becomes hard to manage. It's not unusual for a new user's network to grow to 175,000 "friendsters" in the first week.
...Some social-networking software experts are skeptical about Wallop, saying that it seems merely to bundle existing tools rather than offering new functionality. Some even dismiss it as vaporware.
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.
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."...
Also reported by: Packing a Wallopby Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft's Wallop : Gadgetopia by Deane, The Blog Herald: Wallop being beta tested: Microsoft looking at 2nd Qtr 2004 release Archives, WinXPcentral - Microsoft Research Packs 'Wallop', and TechNewsFirst.com :: Microsoft Research Packs 'Wallop'.
Microsoft Research Packs 'Wallop'
By Darryl K. Taft
...LOS ANGELES - Microsoft Corp. themed this week's Professional Developers Conference along the lines of the company's advancements in presentation, storage and communications, and Wednesday Microsoft showed how its research arm is enhancing these areas and more.
In a keynote address here, Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, spoke on the issue, as well as touching on the question, "Are we done yet?" Rashid gave examples of several areas in which Microsoft's research dollars are going to further the company's products.
In the area of communications, Rashid called upon Lili Cheng, a senior researcher at Microsoft, to demonstrate how the software giant is working on social computing, social interaction and how communication can work in the future.
Cheng demonstrated a research project called Wallop that includes Web logging capabilities, document and image sharing, and other interactive features. Cheng said parts of Wallop will find its way into the Longhorn operating system. The software will automatically associate people, groups and data in Longhorn...
K-Collector