Microsoft Cannonballs into Social Networking and a User-Centric Future
November 13 2008 / by Alvis Brigis
Category: The Web Year: 2008 Rating: 2
Not content to be outdone by the pesky likes of Google, Yahoo and Facebook, Microsoft finally walked the plank last night, cannon-balling into the tumultuous social media sea with the conversion of its live.com property.
In a single brazen move that augmented my long defunct Hotmail account with a smart new MySpace-ish application, Live, the 4th most trafficked website on the planet (trailing Yahoo, Google, and YouTube – just ahead of Facebook, MSN, MySpace and Wikipedia), upgraded itself to a full-fledged social network chock full of the usual friending, photo sharing, blogging and events coordination features, as well as a very interesting Cloud storage play called Sky Drive.
It’s a necessary and nearly inevitable reaction as the major players jockey for web users that can fuel advertising revenue and, more importantly, core application usage.
Most significantly it reinforces the trend of web companies providing ever more user value through applications that help them manage their online world. Even the Big Bad Wolf has now succumbed to the new market reality by launching a cuddly (sky blue theme) social network that cleverly integrates email-to-blog publishing, RSS import from all of the biggest platforms, 5 GBs of free file storage and super-easy sharing of photos and other data.
Though it hasn’t been the fastest follower, Microsoft sure does appear to have nailed all the basics necessary to continue the defense of its user core and perhaps a platform from which it will be able to go on the offensive against front-runner Facebook and primary app competitor Google, which is gradually converting its G-mail and iGoogle interface into a robust and modular social network and mobile office platform.
As time goes by and web evolution continues to accelerate, Microsoft and all of the social networks will undoubtedly be forced to open further in order to 1) make the most of the network effects possible on the web, 2) to maintain the approval of their respective user bases (The Mandate of Kevin). The companies that provide the most application value, network value and cognitive freedom will dominate. With this move, Microsoft has re-established itself as a contender in that gamespace.
At the very least this latest move reinforces the expectation a Cloud-based thin-client OS and a kick-ass web version of Office in the near-future, both of which will undoubtedly hook into Live.
Comment Thread (4 Responses)
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Gmail becoming another Myspace, too? I don’t need 50 social networking sites to give people more information about myself. 1 or 2 is enough.
I understand the cloud computing initiative, though. Very interesting.
Posted by: Covus November 13, 2008
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@ Covus – I think that for the time-being each of these suites aim to be the ultimate black hle of your personal information, overarching in myspace and facebook, that pull that info in so you can easily access it while using their productivity tools. They want to be the portals that make sense of your 50 other portals so that you can keep your eyeballs trained on on location, brand and the associated paths and tools.
It’ll take a while before they allow you to start porting out your data with ease.
Posted by: Alvis Brigis November 13, 2008
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@alvis – Of course, but I’m just kinda bored of this stuff right now. I want to be able to move from one social networking site to the other without signing up for each social networking site.
A social “web” if you will. But we all know the agenda behind these things and I support them. If everyone has a social networking site, the web should just become a giant social networking website…
Posted by: Covus November 13, 2008
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I completely agree that the companies that provide the most application value and cognitive freedom will dominate, but unless microsoft does have something significantly innovative to offer in social networking, I doubt this will be a major competitor.
Posted by: Mielle Sullivan November 14, 2008
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