John Martin's Blog

Microsoft is Planning Much More Than Just Social Bookmarking

With all the buzz about our recent announcement on social bookmarking on MSDN, TechNet, and Expression, it'd be easy to think that's all we're doing. But that's not the case - we are planning much more than that.

Why? Because our customers need more than just shared bookmarks to be successful.

I'll explain.

One of the things you will see when we release our new bookmarking application in September is that we have changed the name to "MSDN Social" and "TechNet Social." Love it or hate it, the name is reflective of a deeper commitment to online social connections and community value than simple bookmarking would suggest.

Our vision is for the MSDN, TechNet, and Expression sites to be the largest and most vibrant online communities for technical professionals, enabling easy connections to the best resources and most knowledgeable people from Microsoft and the global community.

Social bookmarking plays a vital role in that vision, but is just one application amongst a network of increasingly integrated applications - all running on a common social platform:

We are building a social platform to provide...

• A single tagging service for bookmarking and discovery of on-network content (like in Forums) and off-network content (like with social bookmarking);
• A single customer profile and recognition system supporting all site activities (e.g., creating a bookmark, answering forums questions, annotating a Library article, submitting a code sample, etc.);
• A single set of services for Rating and Voting.

With the social platform in mind, a central customer Profile makes networking and groups possible, and Rating and Voting build on the basic promise of social bookmarks (and galleries) to enable "qualitative" input from members of the community and support new discovery scenarios like What's popular? What's good or best? What do people in my network read or use? What about reputable people in my network?

So, should you evaluate our new social bookmarking as a stand-alone tool? Sure. But also consider where we're going and the whole value of being a member of what just might be the biggest online technical community in the world.

Factoid: Over the last 90 days, MSDN is averaging more than 16 million unique visitors per month; TechNet more than 13 million. And both are growing.

As always, please let us know what you think. You can comment on this blog, or talk with us directly in the Futures Forums for MSDN and TechNet.