Microsoft's Development Network Goes Social

In May, Microsoft launched a beta of their social bookmarking service aimed at the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) and TechNet. But, as John Martin explains in his blog, this is only the first step toward making these services social.

Microsoft is building an entire social platform around these services in order to better engage the community and create a rich environment for technical professionals. In addition to social bookmarking, which will allow users to save articles both on the network and off the network and even allow them to tag forum posts, users will also be able to annotate articles, submit code samples, and rate articles through a voting process. And all of these activities will be accomplished through a single social platform.

Beyond just providing a social tool that professionals can use to interact with the MSDN, TechNet and Expression, this social platform may have a much greater use: providing a solid example of how to integrate social tools into an Enterprise 2.0 effort.

While tools like social bookmarking are not often thought of as Enterprise 2.0 tools, the ability to tag and store pages could be a great organization tool for people to save important pages as the Enterprise 2.0 effort causes their intranet to grow.

I sent an email to John Martin asking what technology he was most excited about implementing on their developer networks, and he was quick to reply, "I'm actually excited about two things 1) Social Bookmarking, because in addition to sharing content and enabling social networking, it actually makes it possible for customers to get their content published directly to our sites, like on the VB Dev Center. 2) Groups. It's going to take most of the next year for us to get to groups, but when we enable them, people will be able to organize online around products and technologies, issues, events, companies, teams, anything. I'm really excited about what could happen when we enable user groups around the world with virtual groups on MSDN and TechNet."

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