I've been invited to a Calgary Council for Advanced Technology dinner event tomorrow night, where Misha Jovanovic of Microsoft Canada will speak on the topic of social computing. I'm immediately skeptical - Microsoft & social computing - I've never heard those words in the same sentence before, so I'm doing my research before I show up.
Turns out they did start a venture years ago - Wallop. It was spun out from Microsoft's Intellectual Property Ventures Initiative and took on some VC dollars, and still remains in invite-only beta mode. A little more digging turned up this November 2003 Wired article, where current social networking leader MySpace isn't even on the radar:
"Wallop is Microsoft's venture into the red-hot social-networking arena . . . Wallop enables users to build online social networks in a more realistic
manner than Friendster, the popular social-networking website. . . And while myriad blogging tools and social-networking sites -- like
Tribe, LinkedIn, Friendster and Meetup -- have taken off in the last
year, Wallop may never make it to the marketplace in its current form"
So apparently, it takes Microsoft about the same time to build a social networking site as it does an OS!
Below: Alexa chart: MySpace in green, Orkut in blue, Wallop in Red. Wallop went into alpha testing prior to Orkut's release.
No comments:
Post a Comment