File this in the “strange” category. An email tells us that Microsoft launched a new social network for IT professionals a couple of days ago called Aggreg8. The domain names aggreg8.com and aggreg8.net were sold by the previous owner just a couple of months ago for $5,000, and the existing RSS feed aggregator at that domain name has been moved to aggreg8.co.uk.
The new service is clearly marked as a Microsoft product, and the FAQs say that it is being launched “in conjunction with our partner Culminis,” a not-for-profit organization focused on the IT community. See Pulse 2.0 for a more detailed review of the product.
Microsoft PR almost always reaches out to press to announce new launches, but in this case they’ve been silent. This tells me it is not intended for general use yet.
The service is pretty bare-bones, with little content and few members. Parts of the site, like FAQs, have inconsistent formatting and broken images. Basically, it looks like a work in progress, at best, and it compares very poorly to CNET’s TechRepublic, which recently added social networking features.
This reminds us of a previous Microsoft social site for developers called The Hive, which launched in 2005.
I wonder why they are using this domain for the service. I bet there are enough good domains out there that would describe the service a bit better.
The service still does lack a bunch of functions. I think a chat for work-groups for instance would be a nice idea. Also an extended profile where you can enter various messenger-IDs etc and not only a biography would be great. Location, preferred languages and so on would be pretty cool to.
Microsoft does have the money to promote this so I’m sure the service will be grow pretty strong.
There is the possibility to tag other users. I did not test it because I’m not sure if those tags would be public. If yes I think this is not a smart move because you always can tag another user with lets say inappropriate words.
I joined up and made a comment yesterday. It was a comment on the format of the site, and today the post (and associated comments) appears to have been removed. Probably because a few of us were saying how crap it actually is…
The Hive hasn’t been killed off. You got the domain wrong. http://hive.net/
Things like “open”, “community controlled” and “social” are Castor oil to Microsoft – what did you expect?
Long – you’re right, although inthehive.com was the original domain for the service. I’ll update the post. The interesting thing is that I was talking to a developer about it and he said he was looking forward to participating last year and then it just disappeared. Perhaps when they changed the domain name some users got lost.
Cool, you got my e-mail, I was looking for a way to tell you about this and didn’t know if the ‘Add my product’ form was the best. you should add a link for people to send just general info.
Also, this site is really bad.
Bryce, my email is editor AT techcrunch. email any time. everyone else does.
Thanks for the tip.
I did not know that The Hive existed. I’m surprised that Microsoft is working on multiple social networks rather than just focusing on one like Google is doing with Orkut. Google is even implementing Google Talk and VoIP into Orkut.
By the way, Mike, thank you so much for the referral! I am extremely appreciative for that.
Amit – of course. You went to the trouble of testing out the service, whereas I got distracted, bored and then angry at it.
One of our authors at Profy posted an article about Aggreg8 at http://www.prof...rosoft-myspace/ back on Saturday. I still have not managed to get any comments on succesful use of the new network.
What I fail to see is the strategic advantage of releasing this mundane product. The site hasn’t received any good reviews, for obvious reasons. I signed up a week ago, and since then, even the most active communities on there are inactive. Lesson for everone else: do not expand out to too many categoties/communities if you don’t have the users to fill the space. Expand slowly.
The main question, though, is how does this place make things easier for IT professionals? It does not.
- Jawad (Shuzak)
Microsoft is closed circuit. This only serves to further the image that they are lost. Why not bite the bullet and copy Google? Unreal.
I give them some points for having a witty logo though:
“127.0.0.1 is the standard IP address used for a loopback network connection.
This means that if you try to connect to 127.0.0.1, you are immediately looped back to your own machine.
Convincing newbie’s to connect to 127.0.0.1 is a frequent joke on the Internet.”
Found that on some website when I searched for the IP address on their logo
Yeah Amit, I liked a suttle joke as well. I am wearing a T-Shirt right now that says “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1″
But their social network still sucks.
- Jawad (Shuzak)
perhaps the 127.0.0.1 does have a deeper meaning: you’ll get to talk to yourself
I was in on the beta of the site (see: myITforum.com’s group space there), and it hasn’t changed much since the beta — which is horribly sad. Basically, anything with Culminis involved (which is supposed to be a community aggregator), doesn’t do very well. I’m not sure why.
Still, Microsoft is trying to brand this as a MySpace for IT folks. That’s probably not the best way to market this — particularly since the MySpace feature set isn’t there. SharePoint, in my opinion (which is what the site is built on) is not ready as an Internet-facing solution.
Actually the hive is social networking for Microsoft community owners, not developers.
Yeah, that doesn’t seem like a domain name they would really need to buy off of somebody. Whoever owned it sure got lucky. They could have come up with a better name.
Well I love the fact that everyone is actually talking about this! Here’s some comments from my end, on the team building this. Not a rebuttal at all, just some clarification from my end so you can see where we are coming from. See the end of this, my e-mail is there. Love to hear from you.
The goal – I’m on the IT Pro audience marketing team. Our objective is satisfaction, we survey the IT audience twice a year, and in our surveys lack of support for IT Pro community was a big issue. So this is 1.0 (ok, let’s call it beta) on working to solve this. We were told by those we surveyed (a lot of people btw) that the IT audience doesn’t get community support online from Microsoft. But from a personal perspective, I think there are 100’s of community sites, it’s just they are all for developers not for the IT audience.
Functionality – yeah, we do have a ways to go but it’s functional and it’s going to keep getting better. We’re still building, but I think we have to lay a basic foundation. Initial focus was on the working group concept. We heard that IT Pros differ from developers in their need to have more trusted networks. So we enabled the ability to create private working groups. And we tried to simplify the way you work with forums. Postings are made from one interface, you can add RSS feeds into the group and take the content out. Now we’re building on top of that and we want you, the IT audience, to tell us what to build. Hardware for sale forums so you can buy / sell used racks? IT Managers, we’re aiming to help you too since there isn’t much at all out there for that role and not all IT jobs are technical. Social networking, I’ve been in this industry for a fair bit of time (and little of it in Microsoft) and networking is extremely important. Especially in an industry with so much project work. We’re going to keep building there.
The number of groups is actually the number created by the current members. We’re not creating those, you are. And talking to yourself as of right now means talking to 16,000 registered members most of whom registered in the last five days. Also, check out how many Linux user groups there are. If you want to talk about Linux then go ahead! Seriously, it’s your community.
The goal is to make this specific to IT. So yeah, we could go open a form inside Live Spaces. But how would we support social networking specific to this community? How would we allow private groups where you can share scripts? This isn’t a new community platform, it’s a community intended for IT. That’s why our tagline makes sense to you, but I’m confident if you don’t know what it means you likely shouldn’t be there.
The platform – The site is actually built on Community Server, but we’ve made some significant enhancements so it’s not just a set of fixed forums. We looked at Sharepoint but the last version didn’t support our needs. This new release might but we’re not re-platforming for a while.
Comments, good, bad, ugly and even a positive one welcome – michward@microsoft.com Help us define what this should be so you can make it yours.
We also have a forum inside Aggreg8 for posting comments: http://aggreg8....es/default.aspx
Thanks!
An idea that I think could do good would be a type of personal blog for every user with the option to give each entry specific tags. When looking at a work-group there could be a link to browse blog entries from other users even if they have not been submitted to this group.
Also options to for instance add links etc to the side-bar would be good. (so a bit more my-space style perhaps)
Also I personally really don’t think that 127.0.0.1 for IT pros is so good.
Why not rather write it out and say “home for IT pros”, “the community for IT pros”, “the IT pros network” ..
127.0.0.1 makes it a bit nosy I think.
But honestly I didn’t even note that part until Amit has mentioned it – so most others won’t either.
Mike – thank you for taking the time to comment on this. Was this meant to be launched at this point?
Hi Florian: We actually avoided allowing individual blogs. Not that we are against it, but we figured there are some many great blog tools out there, and with RSS you can add your blog to the working group where appropriate. With that in mind, would you still want blogging in the site?
We actually have plans in the coming weeks to roll out the functionality you refer to, seeing other posts by users. It’s really using the search, populated with a specific users id. Good to know this is useful. In fact, this area (the social networking) is likely where much of our effort will be – unless you steer us in the other direction.
In regards to the tagline, that’s actually just for fun. The intention was to have something an IT Pro would get, but the general public would be confused by. We’ll likely take it down at some point. Somebody inside the communit noted that IP v4 is old and we should be using ::1 My reply – once everyone agrees the site is non-Microsoft centric and has the functionality you desire we’ll upgrade our tagline!
Michael: Yeah, we did intend to launch it. But honestly we didn’t expect this much of a response! The intention was to roll it out so we can start getting user input on where to take it from here. I will admit, there are some kinks and we’re actively striving to kill those. We’re resolving issues that are minor like layout, or functional issues that we though made sense but the community is telling us is idiotic right away. But at the same time we want to make sure we build something that our audience wanted so we wanted to get it into their hands as fast as possible. I think we’ll put a beta tag on the banner
Like any large company don’t mix up the fact that we’re not the whole company working on this. But we are a small yet scrapy group who isn’t driven by revenue but satisfaction.
I love the dialogue and will keep coming back here to get comments. And we’ll keep improving it until you all feel it’s representative of what you want in an IT focused community!
Thanks.
@ Daren C: don’t need to go that far. I posted the comment #1 here on this topic, pointing out an error in the post.
My comment was removed. So, it’s not only Microsoft removing their comments, as you can see.
Conspiracy theories aside – we have removed no posts or comments.
M – chill out on the troll stuff. your comment was removed because it was talking about hive.com, something we never brought up.
Unfortunately, I imagine the chances of many serious, non-MS platform developers actually using this tool are incredibly low. Developer communities are always much nicer when they’re not controlled (or dominated) by a single platform vendor.
I must admit I quite like the layout though, very round…..
Stuart
http://www.earnersblog.com
Ben Metcalfe has a great post on his disappointment with Aggre8 and points out that Microsoft is still using passport to make people register fro the site?
Mike Ward,
I was just checking out http://communityserver.org/
and I kept refreshing the website to see what other showcased websites are powered by Community Server. It turns out that a few other Microsoft-affiliated websites are associated with the software like Hive.net, the Windows Vista blog, and a couple of MSNBC sites.
I understand that Community Server runs on .NET, which may explain why other MS-affiliated sites run on Community Server and not other social network platform templates like phpFox. Basically what I’m wondering is what sold you on Community Server compared to its competitors.
Are there any other .NET based platforms that you think are noteworthy?
Yup, we did choose community server because it is based on .net, but also because they are fairly innovative (they were open source at the time we started this, not sure if they still are). As you noted, other sites are based on it also (channel9 is also) so the feeling was any improvements could be shared with those sites.
The other choices included sharepoint, but at the time we started looking into this it was the last version so it didn’t seem the right choice. But the latest version actually is very scaleable and has some fascinating social networking features out of the box.
In regards to use of Passport any site we develop or sponsor is required to use it. I can actually understand the weaknesses of Passport, but objectively there is a benefit in that it allows you to have one authentication method across many sites. But the larget reason we are required to use it is for privacy.
It’s difficult to respond to comments about us utilizing content for our own use (we don’t), or the feeling that we are trying to dominate the community. Check out the working groups in there now. How many ms-competitive ones do you see(a lot)? We really are not controlling this. But having been outside of Microsoft most of my career I can understand the perception. We’ll have to disprove this with time.
We’re taking the issues you all point out one at a time and working the kinks out. Thanks for the feedback.
Got the invite for this site as well, signed up for an account, not too impressed so far. They will have to send me another email when they have more features.