Microsoft debuts it next Gen community platform

When one thinks of launching or being active at any community, he/she thinks of opportunities of communicating with other people. forums, blogs, tagging etc come to mind.

IMHO, MS is one company that has taken a lead in this space after starting late. MS today has extremely active forums and newsgroups. the MS blogs are a prodigy in themselves and heavily trafficked! and i don't know of any other technical company that has even tried to straddle the tagging paradigm (tagging is a menu system for unstructured data)..

the MS forums and blogs have been running primarily on Community Server. (they recently released their latest - community server 2007).

Now MS has taken a step ahead and is testing totally new community infrastructure. if you are interested in community you might want to take a look at:

 

· http://beta.communities.microsoft.com/forums

· http://beta.communities.microsoft.com/blogs

· http://beta.communities.microsoft.com/tagspace

 

This BETA release is limited by design to the fundamentals, such as posting to a forum, commenting on a blog, or bookmarking a resource.

Aprrox. June of this year, you can expect many improvements to these —including a set of adoption and development tools to aid site owners and developers in integrating these services into their applications—in addition to a few new ones that will address identity, recognition, and reward scenarios.

the purpose of exposing this early BETA is to provide rapid iteration for community platforms using customer feedback as their main development touchstone.

A list of FAQs are available at:

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/beta/betafaq.mspx

To participate in providing feedback: http://www.microsoft.com/communities/beta/helpbuildit.mspx

follow some behind the scenes activity by the product manager:

http://davemscom.spaces.live.com/

 

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